We have always imagined the Barça Masia as an idyllic place, where the boys who aimed high in sport lived to be able to enjoy a sporting and intellectual training, an almost paradisiacal environment where future stars grow up and are happy. And it is that it has always been explained like this, beyond the sadness they might feel for being away from their families. Today even the building is different, there are boys and girls and also other disciplines besides football and basketball. In the early 1990s, however, many felt out in the open.
Joan Jordi Miralles (Huesca, 1977) spent almost three years there, and his memory is not exactly placid. A memory that is at the literary basis of his latest book, Triomfador (Males Herbes, Seix Barral in Spanish, in translation by Rubén Martín Giráldez).
Miralles describes, with the rhythm and excitement of an all-or-nothing match, a toxic environment with constant hazing and humiliation overcome by the effort and goal of being part of the sports elite. In the book, Ulises enters the Barça Masia at the age of thirteen to fulfill his dream, but he cannot imagine what the cost of this experience will be, sharing a residence with other boys far from home, without family nearby: a nightmare.
The writer has drawn from his own experience, but trusts “in the value of literature, which has to serve to highlight environments or spaces where it would otherwise be difficult to penetrate. Other books on La Masia have come out, yes, but they all have a very positive, very dazzling perspective. I do not detract from those books, surely that positive part exists, I have lived it too, but there was also a dark side that, to be fair and honest, should also be revealed”.
The author has wanted to put “the focus from a literary point of view”, because it is not literally what happened to him: “There are points and situations in common between the character and me, but it is far from the story of my life nor does it explain point by point what happened to me. It is a fiction about a series of facts that rescues, yes, a series of sensations, of situations that were lived”. “The experience – he assures – is even more claustrophobic and it was worse than the book, because the book can be read in two days, and I lived there for a little over two years. When the first day you receive a hazing you are already on alert forever. At that moment you don’t know what she is, but you immediately realize that this will be a bit of the mood ”.
A constant oppression that is unleashed in the field and that in the presentation that Kiko Amat made, he classified as ultra-hostile and compared directly with Vietnam. But “who could be denounced? To those responsible who did not appear? To the kids who bitched? The omission on the part of the institution?” says Miralles, for whom “if Barça feels alluded to and wants to do a review, they are very much invited to do so. In short, what the book wants is to raise questions from the reader, from Barça, from whoever, and if they serve to improve coexistence in a space between adolescents, even better”. On the responsibility that the club may have, Miralles recalls that “in the novel it is not evident that those responsible are aware of what is happening at La Masia, but that does not mean that they were not and that they somehow looked the other way side”. Because at the time there were publications from the club that eulogized La Masia, this cleansing of the image already existed, and he recalls a report that highlighted that everyone studied and no hazing was done: “That was false. There were people who studied, but there were many who did not. And the hazing was very beasts ”. “If those responsible for the La Masia youth academy ignored it, they had a problem; Now, if they were aware and looked the other way, they had two problems. I hope they have reviewed it. That slaughtering a newcomer or the powerful or veterans taking advantage of the weak is part of certain toxic masculinities? I guess that has always happened. But there are tools to work it”.
On a personal level, he is clear that although “at the beginning there may have been a process of exorcising ghosts, it was not a trauma.” “I have never felt hurt, but there are many people who were there who surely have suffered a lot and have felt hurt and have had to work through it,” he says. It surely helped Miralles, he says, “to have great motivation, this goal above all else. You tend to find a way to overcome a series of obstacles or challenges to reach your goal. The problem is when one is abused and there is no goal. This big goal saved me, but that also doesn’t mean that everyone who has a goal will be saved.” Because at the same time, the line between triumph and failure is not clear: “To succeed is also to prevail.”
Catalan version, here
