Abstract
This article explores the Franco dictatorship's utilization of football for nationalist indoctrination. It focuses on the Francoist appropriation of Spanish football victories and the promotion of a collective identity that portrayed Spaniards as ferocious, passionate and quixotic. The paper challenges the traditional view that Francoists sought to obliterate regional identities after the Spanish Civil War. As in the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Francoism cultivated certain types of regional identities via sports, seeking to introduce an element of populism and grassroots activism into the dictatorship. Football was also used by the anti-Francoist opposition to foster counter-hegemonic national identities. This article analyses how Spanish democrats, Catalan regionalists and Basque nationalists found in football a suitable means to build alternative identities. The conclusions show that whereas the political nationalism fostered by the Franco regime had little impact on Spaniards, the cultural features and stereotypes associated with the Spanish nation were adopted by different sectors of society.
On 21 June 1964, the President of the Spanish Football Federation, Benito Pico, felt an immense relief when the referee blew the whistle to indicate the end of the European Nations' Cup final. The Spanish national football team had just beaten the Soviet Union to become European champions at the Bernabéu Stadium in Madrid. It was then time for Francisco Franco's little moment of glory. The dictator joyfully saluted the crowd from the box, as Fernando Olivella, the Spanish captain, received the European cup at the hands of Gustav Widerkehr, the UEFA president, before millions of viewers that had followed the game live on TV. The truth of the matter was that Benito Pico had had a terrible week. The Francoist minister José Solís had made clear to Pico that he had to do everything he could to prevent the Soviet Union from winning the final. Under no circumstances was Franco to be put in the humiliating position of having to witness the victory of the communist team. In an attempt to secure a home triumph, the President of the Spanish Football Federation toyed with the idea of spiking the drinks of the Soviet players a few hours before the match. However, Pico finally decided against the option of a collective poisoning. 1 If revealed, the international repercussions of drugging the entire Soviet team would lead to a diplomatic incident of incalculable proportions.
Unlike Benito Pico, Francisco Franco had had a pleasant few days before the final. The day prior to the match, the dictator travelled to Bilbao where he was welcomed by thousands in the streets. 2 In high spirits, Franco at last confirmed that he was attending the final a few hours before the game, even if the idea of having to see the Soviets win profoundly disgusted him. After the match, Franco was exultant. The following morning, his cousin and personal military secretary, Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, noticed that the dictator was much more vivacious than usual. In their daily meeting the dictator congratulated himself on the public ovations he had received in the stadium. ‘Our unity and patriotism has been shown to the millions who watched the game all over the world’, he happily told his cousin. 3 In the afternoon, Franco received the Spanish national squad, the selección española, at his official residence, the Pardo Palace, where he jubilantly posed for the cameras. Four days later, the government decorated the president of the Spanish Football Federation, the national coach and the Spanish players, in yet another photo opportunity to stress the links between the dictatorship and the European champions. 4
The Euro 64 competition provided the Franco dictatorship with an excellent opportunity to draw on football for propaganda purposes. As a matter of fact, by 1964 the Franco dictatorship had a long tradition of using soccer as a means of nationalist indoctrination. Since its inception during the Spanish Civil War to the death of Franco in 1975, the military regime promoted a nationalist narrative associated with soccer, seeking to increase the identification of Spaniards with the dictatorship. Yet football was also utilized to foster alternative identities to the far-right Spanish nationalism promoted by the dictatorship. Spanish democrats, Catalan regionalists and Basque nationalists also found in football a suitable means to build alternative identities to the official one. This article analyses the Francoist employment of football for nationalist indoctrination and the counter-hegemonic identities expressed by the democratic opposition, with special attention to events in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
This research challenges two ideas about the Franco dictatorship which have been very popular among some scholars. Firstly, the paper questions the historiographical view that claims that Francoism aimed to obliterate regional identities in the early years of the dictatorship. This traditional line of interpretation argues that the Franco dictatorship sought to destroy Catalan and Basque cultures as part of its bid to impose a centralist Spanish national identity. 5 According to this reading of the past, sports, in general, and football, in particular, served to punish those Catalan and Basque teams associated with regional diversity and to enforce a Castilian-centred Spanish nation. 6 However, a close scrutiny of football during the 1940s provides us with a different, somewhat more complex picture of the Franco regime's utilization of football. Spanish fascism, like its German and Italian counterparts, cultivated certain types of regional identities in an attempt to introduce an element of populism into the dictatorship. The Franco regime pursued the manipulation rather than eradication of regional identities.
Secondly, the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s have often been considered the years when football acted as a catalyst for Catalan and Basque nationalisms. While there is no doubt that regional nationalist movements used football to reach different sectors of society, this article questions the often crude representations of F.C. Barcelona and Athletic de Bilbao as archetypical agencies of Catalan and Basque nationalists respectively. 7 The following pages show that the above cases were more nuanced, as multiple identities – regional nationalist and otherwise – were nurtured in the stadia of F.C. Barcelona and Athletic de Bilbao under Franco. Some scholars have argued that the propagation of Catalan and Basque nationalist identities in the 1960s and early 1970s led to a concomitant decrease in the presence of Francoist Spanish nationalism in football. 8 The alleged decline of Francoist Spanish nationalism has been attributed to the fact that the regime used football to promote a so-called ‘culture of evasion’ among Spaniards. 9 As the country was socially transformed in the 1960s and 1970s, the military dictatorship opted to foster football in the state-controlled media. Apparently, the idea was to use football as a mechanism of distraction to keep Spaniards detached from politics. Football became a tool to de-politicize Spaniards, a ‘political somniferous’. 10 Logical as the argument might seem, the records suggest that the military dictatorship never ceased to use football as a device for political instruction and nationalist propaganda. A different question, of course, is how successful the Franco dictatorship was when it came to indoctrinating the population via football. In this respect, this article argues that whereas the political discourse of the Franco regime had little impact on ordinary Spaniards, the cultural features and stereotypes associated with the Spanish nation effectively permeated different sectors of society.
The article is divided into two parts. The first section explores the Francoist utilization of football in the period 1939–1959. The second part deals with the dictatorship's continuities in the ‘instrumentalization’ of the game and the re-emergence of Catalan and Basque nationalisms in stadia during the 1960s and 1970s.
Early Francoism
Like their Italian and German counterparts, Francoists brutally imposed a centralized, fascistic political system and used sport as an instrument of nationalist indoctrination. Franco granted the regime's single party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S., the control of the National Board of Sport (Delegación Nacional de Deporte) and appointed General José Moscardó Ituarte its leader. Moscardó's initial plans included the absolute subordination of sports to the Francoist state, a special emphasis on gymnastics and the introduction of compulsory biological cards (ficha biológica) for all Spaniards. The ultimate goal was the improvement of the ‘Spanish race’. 11 Fully aware of the propagandistic importance of football, the Francoists created their selección española during the Civil War. The team's debut took place against Real Sociedad in San Sebastian in December 1938. 12 But this was a Spanish national team with a twist. Moscardó changed the customary red shirts of the selección española for dark blue ones, a colour associated with the Falange.
After the Civil War, the Franco regime also sought to turn football stadia into ‘patriotic churches’, where the Spanish nation and its values could be celebrated. Thus players were commanded to give the fascist salute and sing the Falangist anthem Cara al sol before matches started. 13 Fascist ceremonies took place against the background of a society terrified by the regime's brutal repression and suffocating control of the media. 14 But, as in other counter-revolutionary dictatorships of the 1940s, the Franco regime was not only built on state terror and popular fear, but it also counted on the active collaboration of different sectors of society. Former Francoist soldiers, clergymen, Falangists and thousands of ordinary Spaniards voluntarily took part in the denunciation and repression of Republicans in villages, towns and cities all over the country. 15 Moreover, many Spaniards developed what social historians have called ‘acquiescence to the dictatorship’. 16 This acquiescence did not translate into an outspoken support for the Franco regime but rather into a silent consent, a passive identification that helped to perpetuate the dictatorial status quo. Although a national consensus was impossible after the Civil War, mainly due to the Francoist taste for revenge and unwillingness for reconciliation, the dictatorship was built on the active participation of many ordinary Spaniards and the passive identification of many more.
The choice of Germany, Italy, Vichy France, Portugal and Switzerland to play friendly matches speaks volumes about Franco's sympathies during the Second World War. Unsurprisingly, the games of the selección became vehicles for the exaltation of international fascism. The 1942 Germany v. Spain game is a case in point. True to their theatrical sense of political and sporting events, local authorities decorated the avenue that led to the Berlin Olympic Stadium with thousands of German and Spanish flags. The Nazis also handed Spanish and Falangist ensigns to members of the Blue Division (the Francoist troops fighting alongside Germany on the Eastern front) and hundreds of Berlin-based Spanish workers. Before the game the 100,000 spectators listened to the national anthems while giving the fascist salute. Then, the selección players publicly honoured their German hosts and gave the Blue Division Colonel Mariano Gómez Zamalloa a pennant ‘as a proof of the affection and admiration that all Spanish players feel for their brothers fighting in Russia’. 17 The anti-communist obsession was also present in the words of the Reichssportführer (Reich Sports Leader), Hans von Tschammer und Osten, who declared that the match showcased ‘the beautiful and loyal friendship between two peoples who are united in combat against the world enemy in the Russian battlefields’. 18
Together with the promotion of international fascism, the selección’s friendly matches were conceived to foster the identification of the Spanish regime with the national football team. In these games, the dictatorship developed what could be called a ‘narrative of the Spanish fury’. This narrative characterized Spanish footballers, and by extension all Spaniards, by their furia, a term that translates as fury or rage, but also has connotations of passion, bravery and courage. The ‘narrative of the Spanish fury’ was not a Francoist invention. It had emerged in 1920 when the selección won the silver medal at the Antwerp Olympics. In Belgium, the international press unflatteringly described the Spanish team's style as unsophisticated, furious and violent. Yet the Iberian newspapers happily turned the negative connotations of the Spanish fury upside-down and endowed the term with positive overtones. 19 The fury of the selección was thus presented as bravery and guts, while violence on the pitch denoted the allegedly extraordinary fighting spirit of Spaniards. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the popularization of the myth of the fury all over Spain. In the 1940s, the Francoists perpetuated this narrative, and mentions of the furia española became clichéd in the media. 20 After all, the concepts associated with the fury (virility, force, courage, sacrifice, fighting spirit …) were music to the Francoists’ ears.
In a very fascist manner, the improvement of the Spanish race via sports became a key notion of the Franco regime. However, the understanding of Spaniards as fundamentally individualistic remained as part of the discourse too. In the words of Eduardo Teus, journalist and coach of the selección in 1941, Spain should not play as a team, for ‘it never existed’. 21 Spain should rather bet on the ‘improvisation and individualism of our race’ to win matches. 22 Along the same lines, in 1941, Juan Deportista, the author of the bestseller La furia española (1924), pointed to the lack of individual ‘stars’ to explain why Spain had not achieved the success of the 1920 Antwerp Olympics ever again. 23 This praise of individuality and improvisation was not new. 24 As in the case of the myth of the fury, the vaunted individualism of Spanish players and its concomitant quixotic attitudes were first formulated in the 1920s and later reused by the Francoists in the 1940s. 25 In a Europe dominated by the Nazis, in a Spain where the fascist Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S. was at the peak of its political power, a quixotic image of Spanish footballers, individualistic and quick to improvise, swathed the myth of the fury.
One of the main Francoist targets, at times quite literally, was regional nationalism. For the Francoists, football during the Second Republic (1931–1939) had been ‘a red orgy of the lowest and vilest regional passions’, in which almost everyone behaved ‘in a separatist and rude way’. 26 In the words of the Basque Falangist Jacinto Miquelarena, the separatist virus had spread everywhere and even Real Madrid supporters were regional nationalists, that is to say, ‘mentally retarded parochial people when confronted with national limits’. 27 The eradication of Basque and Catalan nationalist symbolism became paramount for those responsible for football in the Francoist ‘New State’. Members of the Falange were parachuted into the executive boards of all first division clubs and Castilian became the only official language in Spanish football. Additionally, Francoist censors were instructed to get rid of foreign terms in football reports and words such as ‘corner’, ‘amateur’ and ‘match’ were persistently translated into Spanish before publication. 28 The process of linguistic cleansing reached levels of plain absurdity when some clubs were forced to translate their English names into Spanish. Thus Athletic de Bilbao became Atlético de Bilbao and Sporting de Gijón changed to Deportivo de Gijón.
The fascist discourse of the early Franco years was rabidly nationalist, yet this in no way implied the complete elimination of the idea of region within it. This was a common trait in fascist dictatorships. Many policy-makers within the Nazi party saw local and regional political appetites as a valuable corrective to bureaucratization and a liberal tradition of political centralization. 29 Italian fascists too used local and regional cultures to foster a new national identity. In an attempt to reinforce an Italian sense of belonging, the Mussolini regime reinvented regional traditions conveniently celebrated in new popular festivals and promoted local dialects in the theatre, choirs, poetry and folk music. 30 As in the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Francoism cultivated certain types of regional identities. Seeking to introduce an element of populism and grassroots activism, the Falange Española Tradicionalista promoted folk music, regional dances, local fiestas and religious and costumbrist literature. 31 In all cases, German, Italian and Spanish regions were understood to be totally subordinate to their respective nations and separatist movements were heavily repressed, but this did not mean that fascist dictators intentionally sought to obliterate all regional identities in the 1940s. Often, the relationship between regional and national identities was one of mutual reinforcement.
Hitler, Mussolini and Franco used sports to manipulate local, provincial and regional identities, seeking to promote a love for the nation. 32 As in folk music, dances and literature, some regionalist overtones can be found in 1940s Francoism when it came to sport. For example, the Tour of Catalonia resumed as early as 1939, although the name of the cycling competition was changed from the Catalan ‘Volta’ to the Spanish ‘Vuelta’. Furthermore, regional football teams, a common feature during the Restoration and the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, did not disappear overnight at the end of the Civil War. On 16 March 1941, the selecciones of Castile and Catalonia played their first match after the civil struggle at Chamartín stadium. 33 Not by accident, the game was scheduled for the very same day that Spain played Portugal in Bilbao. The logic behind programming both interregional and international games on the same date was to show a certain tolerance of sporting expressions of regional identities, while at the same time subordinating them to the Spanish national identity. Both identities were compatible but the hierarchy was clear. The following year, on 15 March, Catalonia and Castile met again, this time at Les Corts in Barcelona – interestingly the stadium retained its Catalan name under Franco. The match ended with a Catalan victory (4–3) and was played the very same day Spain defeated Vichy France 4–0. 34 The Barcelona newspaper El Mundo Deportivo was delighted with the victory of ‘our regional team’ and proclaimed it a perfect day for Catalans due to the triumphs of Spain over France and Catalonia over Castile. 35 According to El Mundo Deportivo, not only were Catalan and Spanish football compatible, they were also both at the dawn of a new era in which the regional renaissance was to go hand in hand with the national rebirth. 36
The Franco dictatorship often presented lo vasco (Basqueness) as the original Spanish national character. As early as January 1939, the sports newspaper Marca ran a special report on traditional Basque sports, paying special attention to the pulsolaris (stone lifters). The Francoist publication also included an interview with José Irigoyen, a Basque pelota champion whose 16-year-old son had volunteered to fight for the rebels. Pelota was described as a ‘genuinely Spanish game, played par excellence in the Basque provinces’, in a clear attempt to reclaim as Spanish the very sport that many Basque nationalists considered authentically Basque. 37 Basqueness was also found in football. According to Ricardo Zamora, the goalkeeping legend of the 1920s and 1930s, the Spanish national team's main features were Basque. Long passes, strength and enthusiasm were the real Basque characteristics that had become Spanish, due to the high percentage of northerners playing in the national team. 38 Marca also hailed Athletic de Bilbao as the most glorious Spanish team in history and denounced the ‘plunder’ of its best players – taken by the Basque government to form the Euskadi national team and sent to play around the world to raise funds for the Republican war effort. 39 For the Francoists, Athletic de Bilbao was considered the best possible case of club reconstruction after the Spanish Civil War. All teams should emulate Athletic de Bilbao, so ‘the re-emergence of Spanish football would come immediately after the victorious end of our Crusade’. 40
In some respects, this identification of Basqueness as the essence of Spanishness followed the old nineteenth-century traditionalist view. According to the Carlist movement, Catholicism and the fueros (medieval charters) represented the authentic Spain, whereas liberal and secular ideas were alien to the nation. 41 This understanding of the Spanish nation gained strength during the Third Carlist War (1872–1876) and stalwartly re-emerged in the Basque country and Navarre in the 1930s. 42 After the 1936–1939 Civil War, the idea that the Basque country was somehow the quintessence of the Spanish fatherland attained importance among the members of the Falange Española Tradicionalista in the Northern provinces yet again. 43 The Basque Falangists, many of them of Carlist origin, portrayed Athletic de Bilbao as the ‘incarnation of male Hispanic values: virility, impetus and fury’. 44 The Basque club came to represent the furia española and was favoured by the Franco regime because it was the only top team that played exclusively with Spaniards. 45 The Falange turned Athletic's Basque-only philosophy, that is, a policy to hire players just from the Basque Country and Navarre, into a Spanish-only philosophy. This was an attempt at the cultural re-signification of Athletic. The club presented by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) as the essence of Basqueness during the Civil War was now portrayed as the kernel of Spanishness by the extreme right.
The fall of the Third Reich mitigated the influence of the Falangists in the Spanish cabinet. The Roman salute ceased to be official in September 1945 and Franco implemented some cosmetic changes to the political structure of the dictatorship. This process of Francoist ‘de-fascistization’ sought to detach the Spanish dictator's international image from that of Hitler and Mussolini. However, the regime continued using football to indoctrinate the masses in patriotic values. The Francoist press went on presenting the (few) Spanish international successes as the regime's own. This fusion of the national team and the dictatorship was realized in a society in which football became increasingly important due to the wider audiences reached by the mass media all over the country. In 1940s and 1950s Spain, international matches would be talked about in the press two or three weeks before the event, the day of the game itself and the following days. The matches were also broadcast on the radio, reaching millions in bars, cafes and homes. Finally, reports of the national team's games were included in the Noticiarios y Documentales (NO-DO), the Francoist newsreels compulsorily shown in all cinemas. 46 NO-DO gave a new dimension to the experience of the national narratives, as it facilitated the visualization of Spanish teams all over the country. Thus the combination of newspapers, radio and NO-DO allowed for the presence of a single football match to be in the public's eye and mind for several weeks. The sequence of reading information about a particular game of the selección in newspapers (before the match), listening (live on the radio), reading the press (after the game) and watching NO-DO (weeks later) had a cumulative media effect that reinforced the impact of the Francoist official message and national stereotypes.
The representation of Spain's games at the 1950 Brazil World Cup is a good example of the cumulative media effect and the Francoist interweaving of the selección, the military regime and the nation. Spanish newspapers devoted their front pages to the World Cup on a daily basis, Radio Nacional de España broadcast live all the selección games and NO-DO produced a film entitled España en Brasil. 47 Following triumphs over Chile (2–0) and the United States (3–1), Spain played England for a place in the semi-finals. Spain won (1–0) thanks to a Telmo Zarra goal that was immortalized by Matias Prats in a famous radio broadcast. The Francoist press, which had been writing profusely about the match days before the event, unsurprisingly found in the Spanish fury one of the key elements to explain the Iberian victory. 48 Armando Muñoz Calero, president of the Spanish Football Federation, attacked those journalists who had dared to question the chance of a Spanish victory over the English: ‘[Our players] have known how to rise above all those jealous people because they have faith and are steeped in the current tide of Spanish patriotism. And only have thought that there is one Spain with the best Leader in the world’. 49 The ‘best leader in the word’ joined a party that he considered his own and sent a telegram congratulating the national team, which was duly reproduced on the front page of all Spanish newspapers: ‘At the end of the radio broadcast, through which I followed such an exciting game and brilliant triumph, I send to you my warmest congratulations for your technique and courage in defence of our colours. Arriba España’. 50
Spain finished fourth in the 1950 World Cup and the Francoists exploited the situation. Matías Prats re-recorded the Spain v. England radio broadcast (pretending that he was transmitting live) and footage of the game was used for a NO-DO film which was played in all Spanish cinemas for months. The game was also used to settle scores. On 3 July 1950, two days after England had faced Spain, the Falangist El Alcázar reproduced a section of the Labour newspaper Daily Herald. The section had been published before the game and included a sixteenth-century picture in which Francis Drake ordered a defeated Spanish soldier to be chained by his English captors. The caption read: ‘Our players will do even better’. El Alcázar ridiculed both the ‘historical and forecasting mistakes’ of the Daily Herald. ‘Because neither the pirate Drake, nor his descendants of today did so well that they could beat Spain. The boot of Zarra, putting the ball in the net, has endorsed the sentence published by a British journalist that defeat is becoming England's companion’. 51 With these comments the Falangist newspaper presented the 1950 match as a new episode in the historical fight against Albion, reclaimed the Spanish Empire's golden era against the international notoriety of the Black Legend, while undermining the English national myth about Francis Drake. Moreover, the comment about England getting used to defeat was a clear reference to Britain's perceived post-Second World War decadence in a time of rapid decolonization and economic crisis.
The Francoist appropriation of Spanish triumphs went beyond the national team. The dictatorship also capitalized on Real Madrid's victories in the European Cup (1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1966), by linking the regime to the Spanish club and promoting the fury narrative. 52 Francoism used Real Madrid's success to mitigate its international isolation, while the club benefited from the regime's sympathies. 53 From the mid-1950s, Real Madrid became the unofficial ‘ambassador’ of Spain abroad and directors, coaches and players were fully aware of it. And yet some sports journalists at the time dissociated the pride of being ambassadors of Spain from that of representing the Franco regime. ‘Gilera’, a well-known ABC writer, put it in the following manner: ‘Real Madrid was proud of improving the image of Spain in general, rather than Franco's’. 54 Likewise, the Marca and ABC sports journalist Luis Prado de la Plaza has pointed out that Real Madrid players and directors mentally separated Spain from Francoism, despite the dictatorship's efforts to present both as the same thing. 55 Most probably, this demarcation between the Franco regime and Spain also occurred among Real Madrid supporters, for many of Real Madrid fans in the 1940s and 1950s came from those defeated in the Civil War and were working class. 56
This differentiation between the dictatorship and the nation shows a gap between the Francoist discourse and the actual impact of official propaganda. The malfunctioning of state-controlled sports agencies, underfunded and incompetently run, rendered ineffectual the sway of the Francoist narrative in Spain. 57 The gap was surely bigger among Spaniards living abroad. In 1949, a group of supporters, presumably expatriates, waved a Spanish republican flag at a friendly game between France and Spain at Colombes in Paris. The group of republicans was dismissed by Marca as ‘Spaniards without passports’; but the sports newspaper could not hide the fact that for some Spaniards the selección represented a Spanish nation antagonistic to Francoism. 58 The same principle applies to those hundreds of Republican exiles and economic migrants who went to support Real Madrid at the Parc des Princes when the Spanish team played the final of the first European Cup in 1956. 59 This was not anecdotal. In the following years, as Real Madrid embarked on their successful European campaigns, hundreds of Spanish political exiles and migrant workers flocked to see the team, especially when playing in France, Germany and England. These Spaniards felt the dictatorship was brutal and underdeveloped in European terms but found in the Real Madrid victories something that allowed them to live abroad with their heads held high. 60 The football fatherland was different from the political nation.
Late Francoism
The propagation of Francoist nationalism grew in the first years of the 1960s. The dictatorship relentlessly used television to transmit its patriotic message and football soon became one of the dictatorship's favourite means to this end. TV crucially added to the cumulative nationalizing effect of the above-mentioned sequence of reading, listening, reading and watching that newspapers, radio and NO-DO had on football followers. The combination of press, radio, TV and NO-DO multiplied the potential audiences of the official discourse and the promotion of stereotypes associated with both Spaniards and the selección. Furthermore, the arrival of television had a knock-on effect on the press, as broadsheets increased the number of pages devoted to football and sports dailies' sales surpassed those of quality newspapers. 61 The state-owned television company, Televisión Española (TVE), brought football to every single corner of Spain and systematically and shamelessly used sport to foster the dictatorship and the Francoist nation. 62
The Spanish victory in the 1964 European Nations’ Cup is a good example of how Francoist televised propaganda linked the dictatorship to the selección. The military regime broadcast the tournament (semi-finals and final) via Eurovision to maximize the number of viewers. In the words of Marca, the important thing about the victory over the USSR was the fact that ‘millions and millions of Spaniards could watch it’ on television. 63 For El Alcázar the triumph was a global one, for over 200 million people had seen the game live. 64 As we saw above, Franco himself told his cousin of the importance of the live broadcast for it had shown Spaniards’ ‘unity and patriotism’ in many countries of the world. 65 Significantly, on 29 June 1964, more than a week after the final, TVE played the match again to allow fans ‘to relive the sensational Spanish triumph’. 66
In the 1960s, Francoism did not change its approach to the game and continued its conventional ‘appropriation’ of the national team. In 1960, Franco banned the selección from playing the Soviet Union in the quarter finals of the first European Nations’ Cup. The dictator did not want his team to face the communist enemy and personally ordered Spain to withdraw from the tournament.
67
Four years later, Franco agreed to the confrontation against the Soviets. After all, this time the Spaniards were the championship's hosts and could not refuse to play the USSR. Predictably, the military regime tried to make the most of the Spanish success. The official press presented the match as a celebration of national unity, ‘a party in which nothing and no-one Spanish was excluded’, a fiesta in which all Spaniards ‘from the first [Franco] to the last’ had taken part.
68
Nevertheless, this was a ‘national unity’ that excluded the vanquished in the Civil War. José Antonio Elola, National Delegate for Physical Education and Sports, reminded everyone that the victory had been achieved at the very same time as they ‘were celebrating 25 Years of Peace’.
69
José Villalonga, the national team coach, was also happy to link the trophy to the dictator: ‘Because it has been a fair triumph, it is even more pleasant for us to offer the victory to His Excellency the Head of the State, who has been an exceptional witness of how these boys have fought for it’.
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The daily ABC was unambiguous: After twenty-five years of peace, behind the applause could be heard authentic support for the Spirit of July the 18th. In this quarter of a century there has never been displayed a greater popular enthusiasm for the State born out of the victory over Communism and its fellow-travellers … Spain is a nation every day more orderly, mature and unified and which is steadily marching down the path of economic, social and institutional development. It is a national adventure.
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More than ever, the myth of the Spanish fury was present in the 1960s. In 1961, NO-DO released ¡¡¡Los de la Furia!!!, a film that accounted for the last 20 years of the Spanish national team. 75 In 1964, victory over the Soviets in the European Cup final was explained in terms of strength, guts and bravery. In the second half of the match, Marca wrote, success was guaranteed ‘with the furia of the national team’. 76 The Spanish fury was above technique and sophistication. In fact, the latter could implicitly act as a burden. Spanish players had been extremely skilful in the past but unable to win. In 1964, the fury had led them to ‘win games out of courage, and because of courage they [were] European champions’. 77 The message was crystal clear: the Spanish national team had to be true to the national spirit to win. The President of the Spanish Football Federation put it in the following words: ‘I have enjoyed the game because Spain won in a Spanish manner, with a lot of courage and guts’. 78 Comparisons to the success in the 1920 Olympics in Belgium became a cliché in 1964. For Marca, Spanish players went to head ‘corner kicks like Belauste in Antwerp’ 79 and Macelino's winning goal against the Soviets was nothing less than ‘a play that would have brought tears of emotion and solace to those who were in Antwerp’. 80 The Spanish coach, José Villalonga also drew a line connecting the 1920 and 1964 games. With uncanny prophetic abilities, he stated the following: ‘To date, we have always heard the epic story of Antwerp, when Spain were the runners-up in the 1920 Olympics. I believe that what our boys have done today could set an example for the next forty-four years’. The widespread use of the fury in the press demonstrates its relevance in the pantheon of Spanish collective mythology. In a Spain that was going through one of the most rapid processes of industrial and social modernization, the regime resorted to the most visceral and irrational stereotypes about Spaniards.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the dictatorship maintained its political appropriation of football. TVE regularly played matches and highlights of the best games of the selección española and bullfights on 30 April and May Day, in a blatant attempt to undermine workers' mobilization. 81 Together with batons, bullets and torture chambers, the Franco regime used football nostalgia and bullfighting to deactivate social protest. This tactic may not have been very successful, as the vast majority of the population recognized the regime's unrefined manipulation of football, but it nevertheless emphasized the dictatorship's message that those protesting against Franco were anti-Spanish. In the last years of the regime, Spanish football teams did not get many good international results, so the regime used other sports to reproduce its nationalist discourse. The tennis tournaments won by Manolo Santana and Manuel Orantes, the gold medal in skiing of Paquito Fernández Ochoa at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics, the international titles of boxers Pepe Legrá, Pedro Carrasco and José Manuel Ibar, aka Urtain, the silver medal of the basketball selección in the Euro 1973, the world championships of Ángel Nieto in motorcycling and the victory of Manuel Ocaña in the 1975 Tour de France were some of the cases used by the Francoists to perpetuate their nationalist narrative. 82 As in previous decades, this discourse underscored the myth of the furia, the vocabulary of bullfighting in sports commentary and the idea that the individual genius of Spaniards led them to triumph against all odds. Alongside the discourse of the Francoist political nation was the narrative of the cultural nation that characterized Spaniards as passionate, quixotic bullfighters.
The late 1960s and early 1970s also witnessed the re-emergence of regional nationalisms. The rapid re-industrialization of Catalonia and the Basque Country and subsequent migrations gave rise to huge social transformations in the last decades of Francoism. In these territories, a subculture of political opposition, laced through a system of close family relations and friendships, emerged and gained some hold in the public sphere. In these years, cultural organizations and primary schools promoted the Basque and Catalan languages, while neighbourhood associations, hiking and mountaineering societies, sports clubs and ecclesiastical groups became the agencies through which regional nationalist ideologies were transmitted. 83 From the 1960s onwards, changes in the dictatorship's legislation on associations meant that these agencies were beyond the direct control of the Francoist authorities and, hence, many Catalan and Basque nationalists sought refuge within them.
Football clubs proved an excellent field to transmit counter-hegemonic national identities. The official magazine of F.C. Barcelona, Barça, began to introduce the Catalan language in the 1950s. But it was in the 1960s that Barça gave a crucial thrust to the use of Catalan in the official magazine. This impetus was due to the fact that some of the new F.C. Barcelona directors at the time were ideologically close to right-wing Catalan nationalism. This group of directors began to re-politicize the club along nationalist lines.
84
During the season 1971–72, F.C. Barcelona promoted a campaign advocating the use of Catalan in schools; the following season Barça started to use Catalan to make announcements over the Camp Nou public address system and flew a Catalan flag in the stadium. In 1974, the events organized to commemorate the 75th anniversary of F.C. Barcelona included Catalan folk dancing and shows at the Camp Nou, a festival of Catalan music at the Palau Blaugrana, a mass pilgrimage to Montserrat and a floral tribute to Hans Gamper – the Swiss-born founder of Barça. In 1975, some months before the death of Franco, F.C. Barcelona reclaimed Catalan as its official language.
85
This ‘Catalanization’ of F.C Barcelona followed a social process by which the club had become a symbol of Catalan identity and anti-Francoism in the late 1960s. In fact, when club president Narcís de Carreras famously declared that ‘Barça was more than a club’ in his 1968 inaugural address, he was referring to the fact that the club transcended the sporting arena and reached a social dimension that others clubs in Spain had not. The expression became so popular that de Carreras used it as his campaign slogan when he ran for re-election in 1973.
86
Popular identification between F.C. Barcelona and Catalonia was also reflected by the Francoist press. In 1971, for instance, ABC reported: It was the journalist and writer M. Vázquez Montalbán … who once wrote that F.C. Barcelona is an institution as rooted in Catalonia as Omnium Cultural, the Montserrat Monastery, the Institud d'Estudis Catalans or L'Orfeó Graçient. This is a bit of an iconoclastic conclusion but true nonetheless. For the great majority of Catalans, being a member of Barça or a mere supporter of the club is an act of love for Catalonia. Since it is well known that sentimentality – even the regional – flourishes in many diverse and unexpected ways.
87
If opinion polls are anything to go by, the existence of dual identities (regional and Spanish) at the end of Francoism seems unquestionable. In Catalonia, 53 per cent of the population considered itself both Catalan and Spanish, while 30 per cent identified with Spain only. In Euskadi, 60 per cent of the Basques declared themselves to have dual identities following the death of the dictator. 91 As in the case of Barça, Athletic de Bilbao, too, functioned as a vehicle for different identities: Basque, anti-Francoist and Basque nationalist, but not necessarily anti-Spanish. In the last decades of Francoism, a number of Athletic de Bilbao peñas (supporters’ clubs) were created all over Spain. The squad was seen as a working-class team and Athletic's policy of not allowing its players to become rich led many workers outside Biscay to sympathize with the team. 92 The cantera policy (the Basque-only players rule) also gained the club a number of admirers beyond the Basque Country, not because it helped keep any sort of Basque ‘purity’, but because it represented an investment in local talent. In the province of Biscay, Athletic also embodied a number of political identities. The cantera policy was supported across the political spectrum, and both nationalist and non-nationalist Basques identified with Athletic. During the transition to democracy, in an increasingly fragmented and violent society, Athletic became more a point of unity for all Vizcaínos, Basque nationalists and non-nationalists alike. 93
This is not to say that Basque nationalists did not use Athletic de Bilbao and, to a lesser extent, Real Sociedad de San Sebastián as agencies of informal nationalization. As in the case of Barcelona, regional nationalists became members of the Athletic and Real Sociedad directors' boards from the early 1970s. 94 In 1972, the president of Real Sociedad, José Luis Orbegozo, began to print football tickets in both Spanish and Basque and openly encouraged his players to learn Euskera. The txitu, a Basque flute, was played on the terraces of San Mamés, Athletic's stadium, as a form of protest against the Franco dictatorship. 95 However, the reclamation of nationalist symbols took longer in Euskadi than Catalonia. From the late 1960s onwards, the ikurriña, the then-banned Basque flag, was waved in the San Mamés stands by members of the public. 96 But the flag remained illegal until 1977. Athletic players, headed by the legendary goalkeeper of the Spanish national team José Ángel Iribar, also had an important role in the club's identification with Basque nationalism. In October 1975, Iribar convinced his teammates to wear black armbands in protest at the execution of two ETA and three FRAP members. Iribar commented that their gesture was to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Luis Albert – a former Athletic player and director – but everyone knew it was a protest against the brutality of the dictatorship. As in the case of Catalonia, by the mid-1970s Francoism had lost the political battle in the Basque Country.
This was not the only fight lost by the dictatorship. Forty years of forced identification between Spain and the Francoist idea of nation, together with the moral, cultural and political discredit of the regime among the younger generations, affected national feelings all over Spain. As a result, the identification of political and cultural elites with the Spanish national community was highly problematic at the beginning of the transition. 97 Still, the disrepute of the Spanish nation had its limits. Like many Catalans and Basques, numerous Spaniards developed a sentimental bond with the Spanish nation that did not imply an acceptance of Francoism as a political regime. A case in point is the 1966 final of the European Cup played in Brussels by Real Madrid and Partizan Belgrade. Some of the Real Madrid supporters went to the Heysel stadium with Spanish republican flags. 98 The implication of the gesture was crystal clear: these republican supporters backed Real Madrid because it was a Spanish team and yet they were openly anti-Francoists. The selección also became a potent national symbol among Spanish economic migrants in Europe. Spaniards abroad regularly gathered to watch the national team on television, regardless of their political loyalties. These get-togethers are testament to the importance of football as a means of national celebration and informal nationalization. 99
The simultaneous development of an emotional affinity for the Spanish nation and anti-Francoist postulates took place inside Spain too. The records of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) suggest that many Iberian communists cheered for Spain in the 1964 European Nations' Cup final, while only a few prioritized their political views and supported the Soviet Union. 100 Despite all PCE members being fully aware of the political use that Francoism made of the selección, as well as conscious of the systematic torture and killing of communists by the military regime, they still emotionally related to a cultural idea of the Spanish nation that they saw represented by the selección. Oral testimonies have indicated that the communists were not alone in their love for the national football team and their disapproval of the Franco regime. Some non-communist members of the anti-Francoist opposition even attended the Spain v. USSR 1964 European Nations' Cup final. They knew that a victory for the selección was a triumph for Franco. Still, these anti-Francoists could not help jumping and screaming for joy when they saw Marcelino Martínez scoring Spain's second goal at the Bernabéu. 101 In the same manner that many Argentinians were able to distinguish between the happiness they felt at Argentina's victory in the 1978 World Cup and the blunt political manipulation that the military junta made of it, a large number of Spaniards were able to differentiate between a Spanish cultural nation related to football and a political nation related to Francoism. 102
The impact of propaganda on Spaniards was limited in the last decades of the dictatorship when democratic and anti-authoritarian views developed, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population got their news from the Francoist radio and television. 103 Many Spaniards learnt to distinguish between official propaganda and information more in tune with their daily experiences. They got used to reading between the lines, while a new and greatly politicized counter-culture emerged using allegory and irony as tools of contestation in a highly repressive environment. 104
Nevertheless, Francoists sought to use football to nationalize the masses until the very last days of the dictatorship. On 10 July 1975, minister José Solís gave a notorious speech at the Spanish Football Federation. A chubby, smiley Falangist, Solís defended an increase in the number of hours devoted to sports in the Spanish education system, even if this meant ‘teaching less Latin’ at school. 105 According to the minister, Spain had to popularize grassroots football, build playing fields all over the country and encourage youngsters to practice sports, because these were also patriotic ways ‘to fly the flag’. 106 However, Solís’ plan to forge a healthy and patriotic youth had very little impact on Spanish society, as was the case with most of the sporting projects emanating from the Falange. 107 In the 1970s the Falange was unable to mobilize the population effectively and even some social groups which had shown a willingness to keep the Francoist status quo in the 1960s (i.e. blue-collar workers of a certain age and low-income female workers) began to demand political liberalization and social justice following the 1973 economic crisis. 108
Coincidentally, the day after Solís’ speech demanding more sports and less Latin teaching hours, the film Furia española premiered after months of controversy. In the ‘tradition of very bitter, acerbic, Spanish humour’, the movie told the story of an Andalusian immigrant in Catalonia with a passion for F.C. Barcelona and prostitutes. 109 In the words of Francesc Betriu, the film's director, the plot was ‘typical of here’, for it narrated the life of immigrants and ‘the role of Barça as the highest exponent of integration in Catalonia’. 110 The Franco dictatorship could not see the funny side of Furia española and the movie was banned and confiscated. When the Cannes Film Festival asked for the film to be shown there, the situation reached Kafkaesque heights. Trying to conceal the fact that Furia española had been physically seized by the dictatorship, the Francoist Ministry of Information and Tourism denied the very existence of the movie. More than thirty film critics then signed a petition demanding, quite literally, the release of the film. A year later, the Francoist government finally allowed the projection of a mutilated version of Furia española, maimed by the censors with more than twenty cuts. Still, some found the film offensive before watching it. At the premier at the Olympia in Valencia, the cinema had to be evacuated due to a bomb threat from an extreme-right group. 111
Minister Solís’ speech and the controversy surrounding Furia española in the months before the death of General Franco were highly telling of a dictatorship fully aware of the significance of football to nationalize the masses and the dangers of satire to undermine official messages. While the minister advocated the use of football to promote national identity, the film used parody to portray a Spanish society in which soccer was used as a device to sublimate sexual frustrations and a tool to alienate the masses. Furia española, additionally, tackled the issue of F.C. Barcelona as an established vehicle of immigrants' social integration into Catalan society. Furia española was a very successful film, despite the Francoist authorities' mutilations of the original cut. 112 Irony and sarcasm in culture were the popular weapons of choice, seeking to undermine the dictatorship.
Nonetheless, opposition to the Franco regime should not be exaggerated. Many Spaniards still supported Franco in 1975. The trend in Spanish society demanding more freedom and political change only became majoritarian after the death of the dictator. Even in the last years of the regime, many ordinary people thought that the dictatorship provided them with social peace and economic security – two issues considered more important than democratic freedoms. 113 This acquiescence to the dictatorship could help explain why Francoism had a certain impact when transmitting its particular cultural idea of Spain. 114 As recent studies have pointed out ,when it came to conveying Spanish identity via football, Francoism could have been fairly successful precisely because this sort of ‘banal nationalism’ had no (apparent) political implications and hence was easily adopted by different sectors of society. 115 Football acted as a mechanism of informal nationalization throughout the dictatorship. The sport gained a privileged position in the public sphere, where teams played a national league and a national cup, matches were broadcast on national television and radio, clubs represented Spain in international tournaments and the selección embodied the patria when competing. All the above reinforced a national mental framework which had Spain as its benchmark. Moreover, this ‘nationalized’ football led to a number of nationwide common routines and forms of sociability, such as playing league matches at five o’clock, listening to Sunday games on the radio and reading sports newspapers in bars, that permeated ordinary people's daily lives. 116 Against this backdrop of informal nationalization, some of the dictatorship's cultural references regarding the nation endured in the rapidly-changing Spanish society of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Conclusions
The Franco dictatorship consciously and constantly used football as a tool of mass indoctrination. In the first years of the military regime, Francoists re-elaborated the old myth of the Spanish fury and turned football stadia into patriotic ‘churches’. In the New Spain, the Falange Española Tradicionalista controlled the National Board of Sport and fostered a fascistic and violently anti-regional nationalist discourse. Nevertheless, a close look at football shows that dual (Spanish and regional) identities were expressed in the post-Civil War years. As in folk music and dances, tourist guides and literature, some regionalist overtones can be found in football. The 1940s games between the regional squads of Catalonia and Castile are a case in point. Besides, Basqueness was often presented by the Francoists as one of the original components of the Spanish nation. Thus the vision that the Franco dictatorship sought the eradication of all vestiges of regional identities should be revised. Like German and Italian fascists, Francoists nurtured certain types of regional identities in the cultural arena, although this promotion of the small patrias was always undertaken with moderation and the underlining of the supremacy of the nation over the region.
The political uses of football were closely related to the social transformations of Spain. In the 1960s, the incorporation of TV increased the cumulative media effect and, hence, the impact that national football narratives had on Spaniards. Far from using football as a way to de-politicize Spaniards, the Franco dictatorship insisted on presenting Spanish victories as its own. The utterly political utilization of the Spanish victory in the European Nations' Cup is a telling example of this Francoist appropriation. Thus the rise of Catalan and Basque nationalism related to F.C. Barcelona and Athletic de Bilbao in the 1960s and early 1970s cannot be rendered as a zero-sum game that involved the decrease of Francoist nationalism. In the last years of the military regime, the growth of alternative identities to the official Spanish nationalism coincided with a conscious effort by the dictatorship to use football to indoctrinate the masses.
A different question is whether Francoist propaganda was effective. Some sources show that football fans were able to relate emotionally to the Spanish national team (and to Real Madrid), while actively opposing Francoism. By the same token, not all cheers for F.C. Barcelona and Athletic de Bilbao should be read in terms of support for Catalan and Basque nationalisms. In the early 1970s, Barça and Athletic became hubs of anti-Francoism but not always of anti-Spanish feelings. Dual identities subsisted in the last years of the dictatorship. As in the case of those supporting the selección española but contesting the military regime, Barça and Athletic de Bilbao supporters were able to differentiate between the political nation that the dictatorship represented and Spain as a cultural nation. Besides, not all Spaniards became anti-Francoists in the last years of the dictatorship. In fact, the military regime kept an important level of popular support – a passive backing in most cases, but support nevertheless. This popularity can help us to understand why some of the cultural connotations associated with the Spanish nation via football survived Franco. There is no question that the Francoist narrative of the authoritarian political nation, expressed in the motto ‘One, Great and Free’, was clearly redundant and a victim of its own anachronism by the time Franco died in November 1975. And yet, the discourse of the cultural nation defining Spaniards as furious, passionate and quixotic was to retain its central role in the new democracy.