A full Sunday, by Sergi Pàmies

At noon, the Barça women’s final ends with an irrefutable win against Real Madrid. The concept little hand which when it was born some of us wished it did not take root, is omnipresent and is transmitted from generation to generation. As a cis man educated in the heteropatriarchal monoculture, I learn to adapt to the emotional software demanded by the diversity of club identities, equality and, by extension, reality. It is a transition driven by the success of the players. A transition that, unfortunately, does not finish constructing its own alternative rhetoric and that is ascribed to the excess of stridency and the analytical hypertrophy of the male narrative.

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Things I’m learning: that relationships between female players, even if they are from rival teams, are more civilized and tend less toward comedy and deception than between men. That female referees can smile, unlike male referees, who, by tradition, cultivate an emphatically authoritarian gesture. That the public is more forgiving of the team’s own mistakes. Example: if Alexia finishes a measured cross poorly, no culé insults her with the self-destructive virulence with which, at the Camp Nou, we insulted Sergio Busquets.

The relationship between players is more civilized than between male players.

The Butarque public address system celebrates the goals with a canned song, identical to that of the program’s audience The revolt (or it could be the program that imitates the football chants). The biblical plague of speakers He is, I deduce, intersex. Television close-up of Carolina Graham Hansen: she spit! Spitting was attributed to a genuinely masculine tic, although I remember that one player – I would say it was Pichi Alonso – explained that spitting had to do with salivary oversecretion related to adrenaline. That spitting is a shared ritual confirms that we are experiencing a global transformation of what we call paradigm. Another difference: I do not detect, among the Madrid players, eternal losers of this type of matches, any particularly odious soccer player. In today’s world, hatred is part of a business plan that, apart from the benefits of adhesion, needs to multiply the surplus value of animosity. Regarding the possibility of playing the finals of the Women’s Super Cup in Saudi Arabia, the prefabricated comment that it would be scandalous and intolerable is circulating – and it is very suspicious that this is the case. I ask: is respect for women’s human rights an exclusively feminine issue or should it imply principles that activate a unitary spit of rejection or, if we are so pragmatic, the shameful acceptance of general hypocrisy?

At the end of the day, I understand that I must perfect the moral muscle of my Barcelona fandom. It cannot be that a win by the men’s team against Valencia excites me more than the win by the women’s team in the Butarque final. In Montjuïc, the men’s Barça joins the club’s good football moment and teaches us, those of us who still do not fully understand the priorities of the present (and the future), that victories and good play generate compatible satisfactions and – often! Sunday! – complementary.