Tired of being fed up, we have neighborhood football on Sundays during vermouth time (or after a nap, in today's case). As Barça turns to strange owners – RCD Espanyol path –, elite football is sold to Gulf funds, commission agents change cards and the VAR interferes, the more one values what the CE Europa and Sant Andreu, actors in the only Barcelona derby.
Recent rivalry, here are two football clubs whose future seemed null and void and is present. “There are no tickets” at Narcís Sala, a field petrified in the seventies, when UE Sant Andreu played in the Second Division and Betis, Rayo and Málaga paraded. Ten years earlier, in the sixties, the splendor in the Second Division corresponded to CE Europe, with feats such as the elimination of the Magnificent Five in the Real Zaragoza Cup. What pieces of footballers sweated the scapulated shirt or the quadribarrada those decades!
Why is this local football revived? There are four factors: disillusionment with global football, a hard core of lifelong members, the success of fee-paying schools that allow hundreds of children to feel like footballers and the incorporation of alternative young people, related to the world of kilometer racing. zero, the delicious beer and capable of enlivening 90 minutes with songs that have broken the atmosphere of mass and tomb. We talked about the Desperdicis in the Narcís Sala – the name is their thing – and the Eskapulats in the Nou Sardenya, supporters of injecting ideology into entities that only understood about the ball and miracles (how to balance the annual budget). The CE Europe is more bourgeois and stately, the EU Sant Andreu is more proletarian and passionate.
Eight of the last eleven derbies were draws. Football usually fails, passion never. It is no longer about kicks, insults and referees on the run, nor white gloves. Nobody will watch the derby in Qatar. There they are.
