¡GOL!

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I went to Madrid to see the glamour soccer club of the 20th century play. I mean Real Madrid—a team that, I proudly confess, I detest. Growing up partly in Massachusetts, I nursed a passionate hatred for the New York Yankees that today finds its echo in soccer, the world’s most popular game. Across the planet—the U.S. and perhaps the Yukon excepted—soccer (better termed football) weaves deep into the very cultural tissue. Your choice of club is pungent with politics, incipient nationalism, and class. Your tribal and social identities pulse in team colors. And perhaps nowhere more so than in Spain, where fútbol still evokes raw feelings involving Franco more than 30 years after his death. Beyond the chance to marvel, bitterly, at Real Madrid’s fancy foot-work, I wanted to witness El Derbi Madrileño, one of the great Spanish rivalries, to watch Atlético de Madrid (nicknamed Atleti), the town’s star-crossed, traditionally working-class club, take on Franco’s favorite team. Atleti is for rebels, declares my friend Carlos Bardem, a swashbuckling novelist, actor, older brother of Oscar-winning Javier, and lifelong fan, who gave me an Atleti scarf. I was hungry now to savor at peak intensity the unique Atleti fan spirit, doomed but ever loyal, ever—somehow—indomitable. I wanted to cry ¡Hasta la muerte! (Until death!) alongside Carlos. Though strictly speaking, I’m not an Atleti fan, just anti-Real.

Poor Los Colchoneros! The “mattress makers” (another nickname, because their red-and-white-striped shirts resemble mattress ticking) don’t even enjoy the dignity of being Real’s main rival. That distinction belongs to Barça, the club (for which I root) from Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city and the capital of Catalonia. Most Catalans, and many Spaniards, fists clenched, feel Real owes its wealth of trophies to Franco’s favoritism. This preferential treatment stretches from the skulduggery behind the legendary player Alfredo di Stéfano’s switch from Barça to Real to the 1940s real estate deal that got Real its magnificent Bernabéu Stadium to suspicious (a euphemism) decisions by game referees to, um, coarser touches like the chief of state security turning up before a big clash with Real in 1943 allegedly to advise Barça players to mind their indebtedness to the regime. (They minded, losing 11–1.) The white uniforms of Real continue to symbolize the team’s sense of power and noblesse oblige, versus Barcelona’s continued sense of being neglected—but culturally superior. “History doesn’t forget in five or six decades!” exclaimed my friend Xavi Argullo, a Barcelona journalist. “Real is fucking Franco. It’s crazy, it’s disgusting, it’s not simpatico.”

Not even second fiddle, Atleti has long been considered Spain’s number three. The club did enjoy a particularly ecstatic, triumphant season in the ’90s. But then it actually sank out of the top league for two years (an anguish no American team knows, no matter how bad—not even the New York Knicks). At least Atleti is free of its previous president, Jesús Gil y Gil, a corrupt, bullying, gold-chain-wearing buffoon who moonlighted as the much-indicted mayor of Marbella and whose loony Franco-admiring politics clashed with a team traditionally aligned with the working folk.

What’s remarkable is that Atleti’s fatalist fans are at one with their agonies. When Los Colchoneros descended into its second-division “years in hell,” game attendance actually went up. “They’re the only team in the world who embrace defeat,” marvels Sid Lowe, who covers Spanish football for the Guardian and is finishing a doctorate on 1930s Spanish politics. El Pupas, yet another Atleti nickname, means “the jinxed.” Their whole identity derives from being anti-Real—being the team of life’s long, rubble-strewn road, not of the high powers that be, not of the gaudy easy victory. The best fans in Spain, Atleti’s faithful are called.