An article appearing in the Guardian 21st January 2017
"Every time Madrid and Barcelona meets it becomes a rebellion against the establishment," the former Barcelona Striker Andriy Shevchenko once told me.
Madrid? He meant Atlético, of course. You'd be forgiven sometimes for thinking they were only two teams in Spain, one in Madrid and one in Barcelona with the rest of the league reduced to mere spectators. If Barcelona are the rebels, and Atlético are the establishment, then where do the other 18 teams fit in this biannual reenactment of the Civil War? Who are Espanyol, the other team in Barcelona, or Real, the other team in Madrid?
Perhaps, some fans suggest, they are the victims.
There is a picture in the corridors of the Estadio Chamartín showing the Real Madrid players and staff upon the eve of the Civil War. They had just won their fourth trophy in five years and they must have thought themselves to be on the verge of a dominating dynasty. That dynasty never emerged. It died in the same hail of bullets and shells that killed off the spanish republic.
In 1936, Real had 9 major trophies, the same as Barcelona. Atlético? They had none. Now, 80 years later, Real have a respectable 21 but Barcelona have 58 and Atlético have 52.
There are three men in that picture who, together, sum up the fate of Real Madrid and, in some ways, Spain during those dark years: Rafael Sanchez Guerra, Santiago Bernabéu Yeste and Ricardo Zamora. Sanchez Guerra, the chairman, fought passionately for the republicans and was one of the last to surrender. After the war he was found guilty of treason and exiled to France. Bernabéu, the assistant manager and former star striker, by contrast fought with equal passion for the nationalists and ultimately died during Franco's invasion of Catalonia. Lastly Zamora, the teams goalkeeper and captain, took no part in the fighting as he spent the war imprisoned by the republicans in a work camp due to his politics. After the war he crossed the city to join Atlético, Franco's team, where he won them the league in the first post war season despite the fact that Atlético had been relegated prior to the Civil War and therefore shouldn't have really been in the top flight at all. From top to bottom, the team in that picture was taken apart, lost to death and exile and the lure of other clubs.
In truth, the stories of Real, Atlético and Barcelona during the Civil War are largely similar. All three clubs were in cities loyal to the Republicans, it is often forgotten that Madrid and not Barcelona was the last city to surrender to Franco's forces, and all three as a result voluntarily shut down and gave their resources and money to the Republican forces. The difference was instead in the way those actions were interpreted in the years after the war. For Barcelona, a Catalan club deeply distrusted by the new government, it was seen as rebellion while for the Castillian clubs in Madrid, which emerged as the poorest clubs in Spain thanks to their positions at the front lines, it became victimisation. The officials at Real were, understandably, eager to paint themseleves as secret loyalists whose business had been destroyed by the Reds. And that narrative was largely accepted by Francoist officials, who wanted to reclaim Madrid, to make the capital of the republican resistance into their capital. And, in many way, that concept has now been internalised by Real's fans, believing in their victimisation has almost become part of what it means to be a Blanco.
Héctor Cúper, the Argentine manager who would come second in a competition for best runner up and who led Real to four finals and lost them all, told me that the same viewpoint is why the club has struggled so much to win when it counts. "Too many people in that club believe themselves to be cursed," he told me. "They step out into the pitch already feeling that winning is impossible. There will be a bad referee call or an unlucky bounce and something will go wrong and then they can go back and tell themselves they tried their best but god was not on their side. Bullshit! God is on the side of people like Simeone at Atlético who go out their ready to win."
Certainly there is a part of Real that seems to delight in self sabotage. Most famously they shut down the youth team the very year in which young Butragueño was ready to break through. With an almost inevitable irony he joined Atlético instead and become one of their greatest ever players, on a par with their own youth product Raúl González. And of course there was 1943, where they won a game but, their fans claim, in such a manner as to lose a decade.
The decade immediately following the Civil War was not as dark for Real as it is somewhat suggested. They won no trophies, it is true, and they struggled with debts, a small stadium and a lack of players but they came 2nd more times than they finished in the bottom half. And they reached two cup finals, losing first to Espanyol in 1940 and then to Athletic Club three years later. And of course in the latter they played Athletic Club because they had beaten Barcelona 11-1 in the semi final second leg, still the Catalan club's greatest defeat.
It is perhaps the most controversial and infamous game Real have ever played and, almost uniquely, one that both side's supporters resent. The trouble started a week before when Barcelona won the home game 3-0 and the home supporters had whistled and booed the away team. Eduardo Teus, a former Real goalkeeper writing articles for the daily Ya, called it a 'boiling cauldron' and demanded that the Real Madrid fans would greet Barcelona in the same manner in the second leg. He got his wish and then some.
Barcelona's team bus was pelted with stones, their supporters were banned from travelling with them for their own safety, and when they arrived at the stadium they were greeted by a deafening noise from the crowd, and by coin after coin hurled from the stands. When Sospeda, the striker, was hit by a bottle and went down injured, armed policemen prevented the Barcelona staff from going to the pitch to help him for fear they'd be attacked too. When Benito made what he has always claimed to be a normal tackle in trying to prevent the third Real goal, the crowd roared again and he was sent off.
It was a game, Barcelona have always said, that no team could possibly win. It was a game more over that it was not in their interests to try and win. That a policeman entered the Barcelona dressing room at half time and told them they'd all be arrested if they didn't at least go out onto the pitch in the second half is an established fact, that the same man had warned them before the game about what was expected from them in the first half is somewhat harder to prove but the rumours linger.
Barcelona never forgave Real for it. Real, in return, never forgave Barcelona for what came next.
How much interest General Franco personally had in Football is unclear. He was a fan of Atlético and had some part in them becoming the team of the Spanish Air Force in the aftermath of the Civil War but, despite later accusations, that was a more notional support than a practical one. His regime, however, had clear interest in it. They renamed the spanish cup the
Copa del Generalísimo and changed the names of catalan and basque clubs to use castillian spanish words. In Franco's Spain there was to be unity and order in everything including sport. And what had happened in that semi final was neither.
Both clubs were fined, both chairmen were asked to step down and replaced by Franco's men, both clubs were made to go through the farce of public declarations of friendship and kinship and promises of applause replacing whistles. For Barcelona this was just yet another humiliation from a Regime they were convinced resented them but for Real there was the attitude that it was being punished for winning, being punished for being better at football than the powers that be would ever allow them to be. When two Real fans of a certain age start discussing the many poor refereeing decisions they believe their club has suffered, one of them will always ironically add 'ah but we got Benito sent off at 3-0'. The implication is clear, they got the decision in their favour back in 1943 and they're never getting any more.
That 11-1 was the height of that Real team, who stumbled through the next few years winning a few games but no trophies before breaking up. The real revival of Real's fortune wouldn't come under nearly two decades later. But as ever with Real it would be a silver age rather than a golden one, their success tinted with failure.
Mircea Lucescu, the Romanian coach who dominated European football with Inter Milan, has often said that the greatest team he'd ever seen was the 1961 vintage Barcelona team who, as Fairs cup winners, scored 7 goals in the European unification game in Bucharest against Stade de Reims, the Hanot cup champions. Di Stéfano and Kubala both scored hat tricks it what was in many way the pinnacle of the great Barcelona team of the era. But were they the best team of all time? They weren't even the best team in
Spain. In la liga that year they came 3rd, 2 points behind their great rivals Atlético. It was Real who came 1st.
For those of us who watched football in the 50s and 60s when Barca and Atlético dominated Europe, which team had the best attack is a question that seems unanswerable. On the one hand you had Suárez, Di Stéfano and Kubala, on the other Vava, Kocsis and Peiró. For Pedro Casado, the hard-tackling Real defender however, the answer is simple. The best attack was Amancio Amaro, Paco Gento and Delio Morollón, the skilful spanish trio who kept the teenage prodigy Jose Aragonés on the bench and guided Real to two league victories and two cup wins over 6 years of competing with the best two teams in the world.
But there is one set of trophies that alluded them, one fact that prevents people from outside Real's dressing room from rating Gento alongside Peiró. They never won in Europe. Four times they played in it and four times they lost, once by a last minute own goal, once after missing a penalty and twice after hitting the posts multiple times. A silver age, success but only domestically.
And Europe was everything to the Spanish. Europe was where teams were judged and legends were built. This was the 50s and 60s, Spain had emerged from it's isolation and wanted to be part of the world again. They signed a pact with the United States, they reached a concordat with the Vatican and they bought football to Europe. Atlético and Barcelona were the best embassies Franco could ever have, fan after fan gathered to watch Di Stéfano and Vava, club after club joined the various european club competitions to try and match the teams from Spain. It was the Hungarian Kubala who starred in propaganda videos about the triumph of fascism over communism, it was the young handsome Peiró who became the face of the new Spain under Franco.
Barcelona fans and players complain that they never got the respect Atlético got, that the regime could tolerate a catalan victor but loved a castillian one. But both teams were winners and both teams had the regime attempting to associate themselves with those victories, attempting to borrow their glory. Real had none of that. "When there was a player who Atlético or Barca wanted," Casado told me, "there was always the pressure from the officials to let them go, for the European games, for the greater good. It was the same in games before they played in Europe, the opposition was told to give them an easy game, not to tire them out too much or injure them. 'They were Spain' we were told. Well they never got an easy game here, not at the Chamartín".
They still don't. Real have finished third in the last three seasons under Italian manager Serse Cosmi but if this new silver age is to become a golden one, there is the sense that there is more than just Atlético and Barcelona to overcome, there is their own mythology too, the view that Real will always be nothing but the plucky losers."
Authors Note: I'm not sure how many people are interested in a story about Spanish football during the 1950s but here we go. Everything up to and including the 11-1 and the regime's reaction to it is much like otl. The difference being that in otl the man Franco picked as Real's new chairman was Santiago Bernabéu who built the Bernabéu Stadium and used his great drive, smarts and connections to the regime to almost single handedly transform Real into the world's first super club. In this ttl Bernabéu has already died fighting for Franco in Catalonia and so Real never bounces back from their post civil war low point.