A long hail of whistles and jeers from a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands might not be the most articulate way to express a political opinion, Arnau Pans acknowledged with a shrug. But, in his eyes, it can serve a purpose.
Pans, 24, is a diehard fan of the soccer club Barcelona and, like many such fans, an active supporter of the Catalan independence movement. On Saturday, for the fifth consecutive year, Barca – the most high-profile of Catalan institutions – will appear in the final of the Copa del Rey, the oldest soccer tournament in Spain. And for the fifth straight year, that meant questions about free expression and the boundaries of political etiquette would be debated as vehemently this week as questions about team tactics and lineups.
The final of the Copa del Rey – the King’s Cup – is the only occasion in Spanish club soccer that features the playing of the national anthem. So for the past several years, that brief ritual has given fans of Barcelona who sympathize with the independence cause the chance to whistle and jeer the song – and the royalty in attendance – with impunity, subverting the stately ritual and exasperating their critics.
Protesters hold banners and yellow balloons during a demonstration to support Catalan independence. Fans of the Catalan soccer powerhouse Barcelona are expected to jeer the Spanish national anthem during the Copa Del Rey final.LLUIS GENE/Getty Images
“It’s a way to show the world that something’s happening in Spain, in Catalonia,” Pans, a graduate student, said last Saturday outside Camp Nou, Barcelona’s home stadium. “We know whistling the anthem is not a solution. But it’s a way to open the situation to the world.”
Political protests at sporting events, and soccer matches especially, are not uncommon. Anthem performances, however, often provide the biggest moments, the largest audiences and invaluable media coverage.
Soccer fans in Hong Kong, for example, have for the past few years booed and turned their backs when the Chinese anthem, March of the Volunteers, plays before their national team matches. In France, politicians called for the cancellation of future games after Tunisian-born fans booed the French anthem before a friendly between France and Tunisia in 2008. And for the past two years in the United States, athletes inspired by the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick have knelt silently during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality and racial injustice.
But whistling – the European equivalent of American boos – at the Spanish anthem at the Copa del Rey has become a particularly inescapable gesture precisely because of Barcelona’s unique position as a soccer powerhouse and a vessel for pro-Catalan ideals.
This Saturday’s game against Sevilla in Madrid will represent Barcelona’s eighth trip to the Copa del Rey final in the past 10 years, meaning the jeers aimed at the anthem, and the King, have effectively become a fixture of the event.
The team keeps winning, the fans keep whistling and in this way a fraught national conversation recycles itself almost every spring.
“You have this gesture of protest against these state symbols, and the centralist Spanish side picks up on it, becomes indignant and scandalized, and the whole thing escalates into a nationalist debate,” said Mariann Vaczi, an anthropologist who has studied the intersection of nationalism and sports in Spain. “So something that starts out as a gesture becomes a ghost, a recurrent monster, for the Spanish state and the royal family, all because the team has a habit of getting to the Cup final.”
Amid the yearly spectre of whistles, the same criticisms ring out, too. Repeating a popular refrain, Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, said this month in a television interview that “there should be punishments, including stopping the game” for disrespecting the “symbols of the nation.” On Wednesday afternoon, Tebas told reporters that whistling the anthem was “verbal violence,” citing the millions of people in Spain, including some in Catalonia, who have emotional ties to the song.
The harshest critics of the jeering regularly call for the criminalization of acts seen to disrespect the national anthem and other symbols of the government and monarchy. Others simply find it disrespectful.
Yet, irreverence toward the Spanish anthem in sports stadiums has a century-old history in this city. On Jan. 24, 1925, Barca fans jeered the anthem and applauded the British anthem during an exhibition match. In response, Miguel Primo de Rivera, the dictator of Spain at the time, ordered the stadium, Camp de Les Corts, closed for six months as punishment.
The act was revived as early as 2009, when Barca reached its first Copa del Rey final in a decade. That day they faced Athletic Bilbao, a team from the Basque region that has its own sizable segment of separatist fans. The result was a deafening chorus of whistles and shouts as King Juan Carlos grimly looked on. The teams have met in the final two other times in the past decade, in 2012 and 2015; each time, raucous booing drowned out the regal melody.
Barca, which the Spanish writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban once described as the “unarmed army of Catalonia,” has walked a delicate path around the debate.
“We do not like anyone to whistle anyone, but we always respect freedom of expression,” Josep Vives, a spokesman for the club, said this week. “Freedom of expression has never scared us.”
Speaking at a book event on Wednesday, the club’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, said, “I’d like to think that when the majority of our supporters have expressed themselves by whistling, they haven’t done it to belittle any symbols, but to protest against certain attitudes against the people of Catalonia that have taken place in recent years.”
Inside Camp Nou last Saturday, at the 17 minutes 14 seconds mark of the game (a reference to a 1714 military defeat that Catalans commemorate as their national day), a large portion of the stadium engaged in a chant of “Independencia!” and waved Catalan flags. Earlier this month during a Champions League match, the chants were accompanied by a flurry of yellow balloons that symbolized support for the Catalan politicians imprisoned for staging Catalonia’s unconstitutional independence referendum last fall. Play was briefly halted, after some balloons drifted onto the field, and the club is facing a disciplinary investigation from UEFA, European soccer’s governing body.
Independence is an issue that has split Catalonia down the middle, however, and some fans here have grown uncomfortable with the political atmosphere around the Barcelona club. Xavier Roig, a communications consultant and Barca season-ticket holder, said he stopped going to the stadium about seven years ago because he became “too uncomfortable with all the pro-independence flags and shouting, which only represents one part of Catalan society.”
“I feel the club has allowed itself to be invaded by radical Catalan nationalism,” added Roig, who once led the campaign to elect Joan Laporta as president of the club. He suggested the club was tacitly encouraging such behaviour.
But the notion that politics and sports must remain separate can be complicated to defend, according to Alan Bairner, a professor of sports and social policy at England’s Loughborough University.
Bairner noted that the playing of an anthem at a game itself could be seen a political act.
“Often, when somebody says politics have no place in sport, they mean, ‘Your politics have no place in sport,’ ” he said.