Camp Nou

Yesterday we visited Sagrada Familia, arguably the most famous church in Spain.   Today we visited Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona.  Two different takes on religion and the latter was clearly more popular.  What that says about 21st century Europe (the pilgrims at Camp Nou were from various parts of the continent; I heard French and Russian and Irish-inflected English and Scottish-inflected English and British English but interestingly did not hear any of my fellow Americans) is either a positive statement or a negative one depending on your position about what is worth worshiping.  Make no mistake folks, this was about worship right down to the Catholic chapel they have right outside the dressing rooms in the corridor leading up to the pitch, a chapel blessed by John Paul II some years back.

I had the pleasure of meeting with some marketing folks from the English Premier League at work right before leaving for this trip and they along with a Scottish-born colleague made an emphatic observation about American sport fans:  we lack passion, or at least passion as defined by Europeans.  American think they're passionate, the reasoning goes but we're merely emotional.  Europeans are truly passionate about their teams to the point of violence.  Sporting clubs become part of the very fabric and identity of an ethnicity.  The words you see in the above picture translate to "More than just a club" which is the slogan exemplifying the role of FC Barcelona in Catalan life and identity.  It reminds me of how the Montreal Canadiens are woven into the fabric of the Quebecois.  It is more than a sports team.  It is who you are, and you live and die with the club's fortunes.  If sports is truly a substitute for war it is a much closer substitute here than in the United States. 

My initial reaction to all this is that we Americans are too "smart" to buy into the whole sports-is-life thing.  Yeah, we root all right but I suspect that there's an underlying knowledge that sports teams are simply large entertainment corporations that we happily patronize like say, Disney Word but at the end of the day they aren't PART of us the way they are in other culutres.  I thought this was a virtue, one of those rare elements of American culture that was clearly better than the old world.  I'm still of that opinion, but I'm wavering a little because I started to think that if the passion could be a product of suspension of belief, like the movies say, if it could somehow be trotted out on game days the way so many people trot out their religions on holidays but keep them safely contained in a box of reason the rest of the time could that be a better way?