Mes que un club—"More than a club"—is the Barça motto, and it was easy to grasp its meaning, standing there in that massive soccer stadium (the second largest in the world with a supporters' club of 120,000 paying members and a waiting list years long; for the 1982 team photo alone, to be taken just after the World Cup, some fifty thousand people—more than you could even pack into the antiquated little stadium of Espanyol—would turn up just to watch the clicking of the cameras) alive that day with the fluttering red-and-yellow stripes of the heretofore-outlawed Catalan senyeres, interwoven with the claret-and-blue stripes of the club flags, listening to the thunderous roar go up when Tarradellas stepped into the president's box to exchange prolonged embraces with the almost tearful directorate. Then, after an emotional introduction, Tarradellas re-called in a quavering voice for all present his days as a Barça fan in the 1920s and 1930s, concluding with a throaty "Visca el Barça! Visca Catalunya!" ("Long live the Barcelona Football Club! Long live Catalunya!"). Whereupon everyone rose to sing, en masse, "Els Segadors," the long-suppressed Catalan hymn. Tarradellas, accepting the invitation, had said he'd come only if the club, playing Las Palmas of the Canary Islands that day, promised to win. For forty-five minutes it looked as though he might be disappointed, as the two teams slogged along in a 0–0 draw, but then, about a quarter of an hour into the second half, the old fellow looking like he was starting to doze a bit, Barcelona was amazingly awarded, not one, but two penalties in a row, and they then went on to defeat an understandably demoralized Las Palmas, 5–0. Benvingut, President!

I'd been something of a follower of the Barcelona football club since my father-in-law, the team doctor for lower-division Gimnástic of Tarragona and a fervid Barça supporter, introduced me to the game in the late 1950s. To tell the truth, it was probably the astonishing intensity of the emotions aroused each year by the clearly political Barcelona–Real Madrid matches that first drew my attention, rather than the game itself. The left often objects to soccer (indeed to all spectator sports) as a bourgeois manipulation and exploitation of the working classes, deflecting their passions from the other-directed struggle for freedom and justice to the inner-directed mock-sufferings and satisfactions of team support—from the real, that is, to the artificial, the merely symbolic—and turning a quick buck or two while they do it. This may be so, but virtually all the young Catalans who joined the clandestine socialist and communist parties during the Franco era were also dyed-in-the-wool Barça fanatics, a paradox (if it is one) they had to learn, there being no release from such fandom, to live with.