Homage to Catalonia

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In Europe and Latin America, your fate as a soccer fan is predetermined. Your father's team tends to become your team, end of story. We Americans are blissfully liberated from the weight of such history. When we become passionate about international football, we have the luxury of choosing our allegiances, of falling in love with whichever club suits us best. This freedom means that you will never tether yourself to an eternally hopeless bottom-dwelling club--unless that's your masochistic bent. You can pick a club that squares with your identity--be it gritty and hardworking, or champagne flash.

This was, indeed, a beautiful freedom--until this month. I had adopted two European clubs as my own, watched their games every weekend, wasted work hours reading blogs about them, emotionally invested myself in their travails. But last week my two beloved teams, Barcelona and Arsenal, played each other in the final of the UEFA Champions League in Paris. What glory! What pain! This was the sporting equivalent of those thought experiments about desert-island cannibalism. Which of my loves would I be forced to eat?

I have, over the years, constructed a theory that linked Arsenal and Barcelona in an alliance of virtue. Like the cartoon superheroes that reside together in the Hall of Justice, Arsenal and Barcelona had, in my mind, joined to battle the game's bad guys--namely, Chelsea and Real Madrid, the Yankees of European football.

My teams share the same essential strengths. They eschew boring defensive security for the pleasures of relentless attack. Both exude an irresistible cosmopolitanism. Or rather, Barcelona, founded by a Swiss man, has always exuded cosmopolitanism, and Arsenal learned to do so under the stewardship of Arsène Wenger, its urbane French manager. Both combine their exciting international style with a heavy dose of localism. Arsenal coupled the Frenchman Thierry Henry and Dutch genius Dennis Bergkamp with an English-dominated back line. Barcelona fields true Catalan heroes such as Carles Puyol.

I adore Arsenal too much to concoct reasons for turning against it. But Barça, as the team is known, is nearer and dearer to my heart, ever so slightly. My love for the team sprang from my love of the city. A cousin of mine had fought for the republic in the Spanish Civil War. Why would a Polish Jew, who had never before set foot in Spain, journey across Europe to take up arms with the Catalans? As a boy, I began reading about Barcelona's resistance to Franco and developed a romance with the city. During my teens, I finally made a pilgrimage to Catalonia. It was the week before the New Year, and Barça had no matches scheduled. But to celebrate the holiday season, the club had opened the doors of its stadium, the Nou Camp, to the public, gratis. I sat in a line in the parking lot with young kids, eager to catch a glimpse of the pitch, and old men, eager to visit the trophy case--and I converted.