Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football [Paperback]

American audiences exposed to the EPL, La Liga or any other league for that matter, often times only get to see 2 dimensions of the game. First, the emphasis on the bigger team names, and second, the game itself. What they often fail to see is the intracacy of the game behind the game - that is, the cultural elements that make soccer overseas so unique, so passionate, and often times, so beyond the grasp of comprehension to the audience that is watching on Fox Soccer Channel.

In Morbo, Phil Ball does a wonderful job of illustrating the cultural background to spanish soccer. And true to form, he effectively illustrates that La Liga is not only about Barcelona and Real Madrid. There is much history between these two clubs but fortunately, Ball doesn't spend all his effort on them. Instead he dives into the history of spanish soccer, starting with English miners, to the history of clubs that no one has heard of outside of Spain, like Recreativo de Huelva.

This is far more a cultural study, than it is a history of spanish soccer. Balls successfully discusses how the two paths combine, and how club support was defined more by class/politics/ and culture, than by a jersey's color. It certainly goes a long way in helping outsiders understand the level of support and the long ties people have to clubs. It is especially interesting in light of how the modern world is shaping the game.

Finally, like many sports leagues, there is history and their is myth. Ball does a service to the spanish game by not buying into the myth of some of the rivalries (Betis-Sevilla, RM-Barcelona, Athletic-everyone else). In doing so, he provides a complete and true picture of how the game has evolved on the Iberian peninsula.

For people interested in understanding how events actually shaped the game in Spain, this is a must read. There are plenty of books out there about Real Madrid and Barcelona, but there are few books that look at Spanish soccer with this depth and refreshing candor.

This is a remarkable book. Whereas it took Jimmy Burns of the Financial Times a whole book to wax about Barcelona, Phil Ball does it beautifully in a few pages. Morbo is a superb exploration of Spanish politics, Spanish geography, and the one thing that unites all of Spain-football. Spain is, it seems, a poor advertisement for the sort of national unity that dominated 19th. century Europe-Germany, Scotland, and Italy and later, India and China. Phil Ball's book exhibits a child-like happiness when he visits soccer stadiums in the forgotten corners of Spain. He exposes the hypocrisy of Basque politics, the long shadow of Francisco Franco in Spain and, finally, the exuberance of that Catalan city: Barcelona. This is a must-read for people who are interested not only in the cuisine of a particular peoples-Basque and Catalan- but in their vibrant history beyond the kitchen, beyond the football pitch as well.

Anyone who doesn't know much about twentieth-century Spain will be surprised by this book from the first page, because it is not simply about Spanish football-soccer but about the widely divergent regional footballing traditions that converge every weekend in the stadium. The progression of chapters (Huelva, Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, Seville) is, of course, chronological (following the founding dates of major clubs from the past and present) but also a device to ease the reader into the myriad political and cultural undercurrents that flow beneath the surface slickness of Spain's Primera Liga, which is now beamed worldwide via cable.

This is a great introduction to Spanish soccer for anyone bewildered by the Catalans rooting for Germany during the 2010 World Cup. The author, a British expat, provides the necessary lens adjustment for the outsider looking into this cultural product that now sells itself on a world market but is still dominated by deep-rooted meanings and symbols that are often imperceptible from abroad. The chapter about the national team's chronic underperformance is, of course, now seriously outdated after a European Cup and a World Cup, but the "morbo" surrounding Bilbao-Real Madrid games or Barcelona-Espanyol matches certainly isn't.