Yesterday, 36 hours after Manchester City won the Champions League, the English sports press kept praising their coach, Pep Guardiola. “Guardiola, one of the greatest of all time”, headlined The Guardian. “Guardiola’s City has no equal”, said The Daily Mail. “Guardiola is the greatest,” declared the BBC.
Even The New York Times, of pagan football in the United States, published an article entitled “Guardiola, the man behind the genius”.
The Spanish sports press, on the other hand, ignored him. Little interest, here. Curious, that. There is no Spaniard more admired in the world of sport than Guardiola. There is no more famous Spaniard in the whole world than him.
Fame is measured in numbers, by the amount of human beings who know who a certain person is. Given the enormity of football as a global phenomenon, far above tennis, for example, or politics, neither Rafael Nadal nor Carlos Alcaraz compete with Guardiola, nor even (believe me) Isabel Ayuso or Alberto Feijóo. In the middle of Africa, Asia or Latin America they know who “Pep” is; but not so much who is “Rafa” or “Carlitos”.
What would surprise the English, especially, what would leave them stunned, is that far from being proud of their compatriot, half or more of the Spanish detest Guardiola. Yes, with a visceral hatred. The mere mention of his name makes them foam at the mouth.
As with Pedro Sánchez, the most handsome, most cosmopolitan and most respected Spanish Prime Minister abroad since who knows when. It must be that my condition as a half-guiris conditions me, but I can’t explain it. I don’t understand how so many of my acquaintances, people who are otherwise sensible and calm, get so mad when Sánchez comes up in conversation. Sometimes it was as if the blood was coming out of their ears.
I can see how a Ukrainian might react that way to Putin, or a New Yorker to Trump. But the disproportion between what he is and what Sánchez has done compared to the anger he arouses leaves me perplexed. Now. I see how the alliance he made with Podemos and company could cause some displeasure. For many Spaniards, speaking of disproportion, Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero are the satanic couple. But they already hated Sánchez, even within his own party, before he made a deal with the devil. And the fact that the Spanish economy offers better growth numbers today than the German or the British, that Catalonia is no longer about to explode, that Sánchez is taken seriously in meetings with the presidents of the United States or China how would they ever take, say, Ayuso seriously, it doesn’t seem to have any value to many millions of Spaniards.
Having said that, we will not compare Sánchez’s achievements with Guardiola’s. The treble he has just achieved with City – Premier, FA Cup and Champions – is something else, mainly because politics is a sport of passing interest compared to football. But the truth is that both arouse very similar emotions among an immense sector of their compatriots.
I have looked for explanations in the last few days from people who see Sánchez and Guardiola with more equanimity, but they have not convinced me. I am often told that it all has to do with the original Spanish sin of envy. That the problem is that they are both too handsome and ready for the complex average Spanish, and that on top of that they speak other languages. I’m not convinced because I don’t think the Spanish are particularly envious, compared to the rest of humanity, or that they’re that petty. But maybe it’s a problem of my blindness, of not wanting to think badly of my favorite people in the world.
Another explanation regarding Guardiola, of course, is that he is Catalan, with sovereignist tendencies and that he has declared in favor [horrors!] of a referendum on independence. Here we may again cross paths with Sánchez, a man measured in his attitude towards people who think like Guardiola: he does not hate them as God commands. Or how the homeland – or how a certain concept of homeland – commands.
That’s why it suddenly occurs to me that the problem may be that neither of them are considered to be truly Spanish. If so, I’ll stick with the liars.
