More Than a Club — The Franco Dictatorship and El Clásico

Football cannot always be separated from politics. In no country has that truth pressed down so heavily as in Spain. Twentieth-century Spain bore deep wounds — civil war and the Franco dictatorship — and those wounds were inscribed directly into the history of its football. Why is El Clásico the most fraught fixture in the world? Why does Barça call itself ‘more than a club’? The answer lies in this dark age. There are competing readings of this history, and here we trace its core while refraining from firm conclusions.

The President Who Was Shot

By the 1930s, FC Barcelona had already been becoming a symbol of Catalan identity — a vessel for a region’s pride, set against a Madrid that was tightening its central grip. Yet that very position invited tragedy.

In 1936, General Franco and others launched a coup against the democratic Second Republic, and the Spanish Civil War began. That August, Barça’s president, Josep Sunyol, was seized by Franco’s forces in the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid. He was also a member of parliament for the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), and it is said he was captured while visiting Republican troops. Without ever being brought to trial, he was killed at the hands of a single soldier. His remains were not recovered until the 1990s. Today Sunyol is called by Barça the ‘martyr president’. That the president of a club should have his life taken for his political convictions — the weight of this fact left an indelible mark on Barça’s history.

11–1 — The Night Hostility Was Born

The standing of the two clubs under the Franco regime is still debated today. Fans, historians caution, tend to inflate the myths that best suit their own narratives. Many scholars hold that Franco himself had no particular favoured club at the outset. But his Spanish nationalism did, in the end, strengthen his ties to the club of the capital.

That tension erupted in the Copa semi-final of 1943. Barça won the first leg 3–0, but in the second leg in Madrid, Real triumphed by the extraordinary score of 11–1. Barça fans were barred from travelling, and it is recorded that coins and stones were hurled onto the pitch. There is also an anecdote that before the match an official from the regime’s security service visited Barça’s dressing room and applied pressure — though its truth and the extent of its influence are matters of historical dispute, and it has not been proven. The football historian Sid Lowe writes that this match was the very one that first shaped the perception of ‘Madrid, the team of the dictatorship; Barça, its victim’.

The Stadium as a Space of Resistance

In time, as Real Madrid began to reign over the summit of Europe in the 1950s, the regime’s stance shifted too. The foreign minister, Castiella, is said to have described Real as ‘the best embassy we have ever had’. As an instrument of improved international image and political propaganda, Real became bound to the regime and came to be seen as a symbol of the centre.

By contrast, for those on the side of the suppressed, football became a language of resistance. With the Catalan language and flag banned, Barça was even compelled to render its very name in a Spanish form. In such an age, the stadium was one of the few liberated zones where people could openly voice their grievances and their pride. In 1951, when a strike broke out in protest at a rise in tram fares, Barça fans walked home rather than take the trams after the match, tacitly showing their support for the strike. This atmosphere was not confined to Catalonia. In the Basque Country, Athletic Bilbao too was a symbol of resistance to the centre and of regional pride. Even now this club upholds its ‘purist’ principle of fielding only players from the region — another club that is ‘more than a club’.

Having survived the dark age, the two great clubs would in time astonish the world on the pitch. Yet the ways they played were strikingly opposed. A white empire that gathered stars from around the world, and a fortress of youth development that honed its own talent. The story continues into the golden ages of them both.