Spanish Soccer 101 (for Beginners)

I was already a pretty big fan of soccer before I moved to Spain. A big reason I have followed the sport is because I was lucky enough to attend a Real Madrid match when I came to Spain for a visit a few years ago. The 2006 World Cup finals in Germany were extremely popular in Seattle where I was living at the time. I would go to a bar and watch the games as early as six in the morning among crowds as big, boisterous, and beer-fueled as anything you see on a Saturday night. That was all good preparation for appreciating football in Spain.

The Spanish first division, ominously referred to as "La Liga" here, contains 20 teams, with every large city in the country fielding at least one team in this competition. The second league is made up of 22 lesser clubs. Each year the bottom three squads in the first division are sent down to the second and the top three in the second are promoted. Valencia currently has two teams in the first division: Valencia CF and Levante. As of this writing, Valencia CF is one point behind the leader while Levante is in last place. Teams are awarded three points for a win and one point for a tie. If there is a tie at the end of the season the winner is decided on a goal differential. The odds against this are fairly staggering so it never happens, except last season when Madrid was declared the winner on goals after the very last game of the year.

The Spanish football season starts at the end August and ends some time in May. There are international games in June, July and August, so I suppose that soccer is a yearlong sport. It’s kind of like our baseball, football, and basketball rolled into one super sport. It’s not that people here don’t take other sports seriously—basketball is very popular in Spain—it’s just that soccer has a special place in their hearts—probably where religion used to be before people here pretty much gave up on it. There aren’t many new cathedrals going up in Spain these days, now they build huge new sports stadiums. Teams in the Spanish Liga play one game a week, unless they play two games. Matches are on Sundays unless they are on Tuesdays, or Thursdays, or any other day of the week. Football is as essential as oxygen for lots of people here and they need to breathe it in on a regular basis.

I remember when I first came to Spain and I noticed that there was a soccer daily newspaper. I thought that a daily paper dedicated to soccer was a bit excessive. How much news could there be if there are only one or two games a week for each team? I thought that a daily paper for soccer was excessive until I realized that there is a daily paper for soccer FOR EVERY TEAM! I’m sorry, was I shouting?

I like sports as much as the next slob but this just seemed a little crazy to me. At least it did at first. Now I realize that one daily newspaper for each club is just about enough, that is if you supplement this with the regular newspaper’s coverage of soccer. Some cities have two soccer dailies. Of course, you also have to watch the constant television broadcasts of soccer news. How else are you going to see a replay of Baptista’s bicycle kick last night? I guess that following scores and different European leagues on the internet just goes without saying.

I am lucky enough to be living in a city that has a really good team. Valencia made it to the quarter finals of the Champions League in 2007 before finally bowing out to Chelsea. Valencia is back in the Champions League playoffs along with three other Spanish teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla. I suppose that the Spanish are no more sports crazy than Americans except they dedicate most of the fanaticism towards one sport and it goes on almost all year. If this isn’t enough soccer worship for anyone’s taste you have to remember that every two years there are also the European Cup finals or the World Cup.

Just like in the United States, bars here are often heavily saturated with sports, if by sports you mean football, and if by saturated you mean that people just won’t shut up about it. Just like soccer in Spain takes on the roll of our three main sports of baseball, football and basketball, bars in Spain double as restaurants and coffee shops. Just like the Spanish football season lasts almost all year, people go to bars early in the morning until late at night. More than likely, the bar will have a television tuned to sports news or an actual game, if one is being played somewhere on the planet. The bar tops are littered with football newspapers and regular papers usually opened to the sports section.

I go to a bar at least once a day at the absolute minimum; I have to have one professional cup of coffee every afternoon. Quite often I go more than once a day depending on how much coffee, wine, beer, or food I decide to consume when I am out of the house. This is why I first decided to become fluent in Spanish football conversation. Talking about football is the great equalizer; it’s the great ice breaker, even if my Spanish language skills aren’t always up to the task. Talking about sports is sort of like the knucklehead’s version of Esperanto, the universal language. An offhand remark about football goes a long way in establishing my credentials as a local in the places I frequent. A casual reference to a player in the league who is currently tearing up the nets helps to gloss over any errors I make in grammar or diction.

Of Threats and Lessons Learned

People in Spain are very passionate about soccer. This seems like a rather cliché observation coming from an American who has spent so little time in this country. It seems like something someone would say who was seriously lacking in creativity and original thought. I’m saying it not because I lack creativity or original ideas; I’m saying it as a defense against charges that I threatened an 11 year old boy with violence while watching a football match on television. I have a few other remarks for the jury, or the judge, or whoever you speak to in a Spanish courtroom (I hope I never need to learn this the hard way).

I realize that it is perfectly acceptable in Spain to bring your children to a bar. The Spanish make little distinction between bars and restaurants; they are both places for everyone to enjoy. I realize that it is not unusual for young children to stay up to watch a soccer match on television that begins at 10:00 p.m. on a school night (At least I believe that it is a school night. You never know here with the hundreds of holidays on the calendar). I don’t mind if an 11 year old boy watching a match with his father expresses a lot of opinions about the players, even when most of these opinions are unfavorable and often insulting. With all of this understood, there are still rules to follow when you watch a match in a public place and the sooner this little loudmouth learns these rules the better.

The game was between Real Madrid and Betis (a team from Sevilla). I have noticed that most people in Valencia are Real Madrid fans; at least they are when our own club isn’t playing. Tonight, in this bar, everyone seemed to be rooting for Madrid, including the opinionated juvenile delinquent up too late on a probable school night but who can tell in Spain where people take off work with some of the flimsiest excuses you are ever going to hear. The youth in question showed his support in a sort of New York manner: by criticizing every player on the Real Madrid squad. Guti is slow, Casillas is a lousy goalkeeper, Sergio Ramos can’t pass, and on and on. Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Spain is a free country, at least I think that it is. Is Spain a free country? We say it all the time in America but I’m not really sure exactly what that even means.

I do know that there are limits to freedom. I don’t think that it is acceptable behavior in any bar in Spain to insult one of the best players for the Spanish national team and the fulltime ace forward for Real Madrid, Raul. It’s just not done. You don’t scream “fire” in a crowded theater and you don’t trash about Raul. This is why I told the little punk next to me that he was going to get a serious beating if he ever got down to insulting Raul in his inventory of criticism for the Real Madrid team. His father seemed to agree with me as he threw his hands in the air in a gesture that means, “What are you gonna do?” This gesture translates into any language. I don’t know what you’re going to do, dad, but I’m going to give your kid a vicious beating if he starts talking trash about Raul. I’d be doing it for his own good. I wouldn’t expect that a Canadian kid would have lived to see his first zit if he talked smack about Wayne Gretzky, Muslim kids don’t mock the Prophet, and this little runt needed to learn that in Spain, if you have anything bad to say about Raul, you keep it to yourself. Everyone at the bar seemed to agree with me on this.

I don’t think any Spanish court would convict me on this crime of threatening a minor, especially since Raul scored the first goal of the game on a penalty kick.

¿Algo Más?

¿Algo Más?, or “anything else?,” is what you hear every time after your order has been filled at the market. My Spanish has improved by leaps and bounds since I arrived here some ten months ago. Just the other day I explained to a Spanish friend in great detail about the mortgage crisis in America and how this is playing havoc on the exchange rate here in Europe (If I had known before I left just how poorly the dollar was going to fare, I would have converted all of my savings into half-off pizza coupons). My Spanish is pretty good these days but I still don’t know how to say “no” when someone asks me, “¿Algo más?”

I just want to fit in; I just want to be anonymous. How can I do this when I go to the market and buy such puny amounts of food? I don’t even have one of those cool market baskets on wheels than any self-respecting Spanish shopper takes with them when they go to buy groceries. I sometimes feel like I am the only person in this country who cooks only for himself.

I very rarely just order the exact amount that I need for whatever I have planned to cook for that day. Today, for example, I had everything that I needed and I was on my way out the door of the market when I noticed a type of chorizo that I hadn’t seen before in one of the butcher stalls. I bought two big links, “just to try,” as I told the woman working there. When she asked me if I wanted anything else I felt like I wasn’t even in control of myself any more. I ordered four hamburger patties. Just when I plan on getting around to eating these wasn’t clear to me then and is even more of a mystery now that I have had time to inventory the contents of my bursting-at-the-seams refrigerator.

I now live with two Spanish women who don’t give me much help in consuming the vast amount of food I buy and cook regularly. I think that more food falls off of my plate on to the floor than both of them eat, combined, during the same meal. I have even started using the marker board in our kitchen, like the restaurant chalkboards you see all over Europe that announce the daily specials, to advertise what I have cooked and that I need help eating it. If they don’t get on board the leftbanker gravy train I may end up as the “before” picture in some weight loss program.

I buy big pans, really big. My paella pan is big enough to roast a whole pig, something I plan on doing some day when I can catch one of those slippery little fellas. Spanish people cook a lot with these cool clay baking dishes. When I went out to buy one I measured my oven so that I could buy the biggest one that it could hold. Back in Seattle I had a pot for making stock that was as big as those cauldrons the cannibals in the cartoons used to try to cook Bugs Bunny. I could have used it as a sort of low-rent hot tub. I think my quest for size in cooking is not some sort of over-compensation for my diminished sense of masculinity. The only part of my body that isn’t big enough for my liking is probably my liver, but that’s only because of the amount or red wine I drink over here. My fetish for bigness in cookware is probably because I have never got over the fact that although I come from a large family, I have remained single and childless.

Shopping and cooking have become two of my favorite pastimes here in Spain. I like them both more than eating, but I like eating a lot, a lot. Some men restore old motorcycles or build model train sets. I go to the market and pester anyone there who will talk to me. The gorgeous woman who sells me my eggs told me a story today about how her mother used to make her a treat to take to school that was bread soaked in red wine with sugar on top. You can’t make that stuff up. My butcher gave me his recipe for pork stock. The woman at the vegetable stand told me how many potatoes to put in my tortilla de patatas (it seems like an awful lot of potatoes but I’m going to trust her on this). I used to have to walk six or seven blocks to get to my old neighborhood market. Now I can practically trip from my front door step and fall into the Ruzafa Market. I think that I will be there almost daily.

I take shortcuts through the market when I am on the other side coming home. This could prove to be dangerous as I already have toxic levels of pork in my system and it wouldn’t kill me to walk the extra steps around the outside of the market. But the market is fun, the market is exciting, it’s where everyone goes. It’s like a disco during the daylight hours. There is no cover charge but if you’re like me, you’ll always spend more than you planned.

It’s Time to Renew America’s Message

The war in Iraq has probably done more to recruit potential terrorists worldwide that any event since the first Arab-Israeli war. America’s war on drugs has had a similarly reverse effect of what was intended. It has created some of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations. I remember seeing William Bennet, the self-righteous former “Drug Czar,” on a TV talk show during his tenure combating drugs. He was asked to point to a single thing that proved that America was winning the “war on drugs,” a terrifically expensive campaign that was, by then, already decades old. He started reciting seizures and arrests when he was stopped by the host who said that this didn’t illustrate that we were winning. It was hard to tell if Bennet was being stupid or mendacious in his response.

Conservatives continue to see drugs as a law and order issue. Their solution has always been to lock up drug offenders. That certainly has worked well for us over the past 40 years or so as a stroll through most American inner cities will show.

Our belligerency against Cuba has kept Castro in power for over 50 years in a very unstable region of the world. America’s strategy in the Cold War enabled some of the worst abuses in human rights in Latin America, simply because those regimes claimed to be anti-communist—most never claimed to be democratic. Our support of military dictators in the region probably did more to recruit potential communist sympathizers than the writings of Mao, Lenin, and Che Guevarra put together.

With the invasion of Iraq, America has replaced Israel on the Islamic world’s shit list. Now the Muslim world has an even more formidable enemy, now they are the David against the U.S. Goliath. They were humiliated continuously when these roles were reversed in their wars with Israel. Israel is still targeted for destruction by the Muslim extremists, but Israel will now have to wait in line as they take out their frustrations on America. In fact, now the Muslim extremists target the entire Western world in their diatribes. Even cartoonists are singled out as targets for the wrath of the followers of Mohammed.

I guess America’s leaders just feel that it is important for us to be at war with someone or something. After arming to the teeth half of all of the half-assed nations on earth during the Cold War, and with our Soviet rivals arming the other half, we now live in a world that has ostensibly been without a world war in 60 years, yet is full of regional conflicts, each with a seemingly endless supply of weapons. We are now talking about a war with Iran, a country that was one of the biggest buyers of U.S. arms for a generation. This wasn’t the only of our Cold War strategies that came back to bite us in the ass.

During the height of the Iraq-Iran War, Henry Kissinger said, “The only pity is that only one side can lose.” America was an ally to Iraq in this war, true to our Kissinger strategy of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend no matter how loathsome they may be.” So we armed all of the enemies of our enemies. As another famous man once said, “The chickens are coming home to roost.” Kissinger was wrong about only one side losing; more than one side has lost in our disastrous policies in the Middle East. We have lost.

Just like our war against communism, the war on terrorism is a battle against an idea. Just like communism, you cannot really wage a war against terrorism and the elements we associate with it. Bush has made a disastrously valiant attempt to use our military to defeat an idea. People talk about “winning” and “losing” in Iraq, as if we will even know if either happens (although I think we lost the day we invaded). Those involved in dreaming up the war in Iraq have conveniently changed every definition of success there to reflect their own failures in policy. It is impossible for me to look at our policy in Iraq and see anything but failure, and a failure we will feel for a generation.

After shying away from the myth that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the neo-cons pushed for a new reality. They said that we were in Iraq to create a new state that would be a “bulwark against terrorism and beachhead of democracy in the Middle East” (I am borrowing their words—they sicken me as well). It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to convince our allies in the region to adopt the principles of democracy than to impose it upon our enemies. Saudi Arabia is about as far from being a democracy as you can get, yet they are supposedly one of our main allies in the region. If the idea America wishes to project to the Middle East can’t even take root in an allied nation, what hope do we have of it being accepted in enemy territory?

At the beginning of the Iraq war the neo-cons lambasted anyone who tried to compare the situation there to our failed policy in Viet Nam. Five years later President Bush wanted to link the two conflicts by laying the blame for our losses in both theaters on those who opposed the wars, saying that those Americans lack the resolve to win. First of all, I fail to see how resolve on this issue will insure success. Resolve is blowing yourself up among women and children for your cause, something I hope no American would consider for any reason. What failed us in Viet Nam and is failing us in Iraq is the lack of resolve in the idea we are trying to impose on the regions.

I don’t know too many people who think that complete pacifism is the way to effect policy, but warfare has had more than its share of disastrous outcomes. It is impossible for me to imagine how Iraq could be worse off, how the entire arena of Islamic extremism could be worse had we not invaded Iraq. The issue of America’s crumbling economy under the staggering cost of the war, and the human casualties is another matter altogether.

For the past 25 years or so America has been failing in its message to the world. We are slipping in our stature as the beacon of democracy, equality, and opportunity. Our idea is less compelling, less convincing to the world than it once was. We need to work on our idea here at home. This means we need to stop exporting it abroad by force.

Islamic extremism presents a challenge to America’s ideas of freedom and democracy. It is a feeble challenge and one that would quickly die under the light of casual scrutiny but a challenge that cannot be faced through warfare. Warfare has strengthened the position of the extremists in Islam and has made their voices heard from Morocco to Afghanistan, while America’s message has been lost in our heavy-handed approach to terrorism.

Here in Spain, it is easy to see the stark contrast between the Muslim world and the West. On the one hand, you have oppressive religious states that seek to control every aspect of human life. Religious police roam the streets in many countries punishing women for showing a bit of hair or for wearing make-up. The sexes are almost completely segregated. Alcohol is prohibited. Spain has nude beaches and has more bars than any country on earth. Which idea do you think will win out in the end?

Saturday Night Lights

It’s pissing down rain here, Seattle style, so I’m stuck at home tonight. I have my choice right now of watching The Englsih Patient in Spanish or the football game on La Sexta, the heavy weight TV station in Spain. The game is Barcelona against Sevilla in Barcelona. They are also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the stadium there, Camp Nou.

There is still more than the better part of an hour before the game starts so La Sexta is showing all of the festivities at the stadium in Barcelona. Everything at the stadium is being translated by the announcers for all of the slobs like me who don’t speak Catalan. It looks like a great time tonight in Barcelona. Their squad is so loaded with talent this year that it’s difficult to believe that they could lose a single game.

Their newest addition is French superstar, Thierry Henry, formerly with Arsenal. They like showing a clip of a game where Henry is literally getting his jersey ripped off his body by a defender and he uses the back of his foot to kick the ball between both his and the defender’s legs to score a goal. As if Barcelona even needed another star player. Every member of their team is a world class player: Ronaldinho, Messi, Deco, Marquesa, Abidal, Iniesta, among others. They don’t have a single player that any other team in the world wouldn't kill someone to sign.

Oops! I just turned the channel during a commercial break and The Simpsons is on the next station so it appears that I’ll miss the first part of the match. It looks like a good one. Gotta go.