Phil Ball

“The terrible beauty of Spanish football is that someone, somewhere, hates your guts and will always be delighted to demonstrate this when your team comes to town.”

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good national legend.”

“In Coruña, people sit around on the sea walls or the rocks and stare out to sea, as if they expect Francis Drake to turn up again and sack the city. A contemplative lot, the Galicians.”

“Que se jodan.'It was as if the girl had summed up, in three words, the way Spanish regions really feel about each other.”

“I reserve the right to do what I like" he (Manuel Ruíz de Lopera) announced to the press, a statement that rather sums up the moral state of the game in Spain.”

“Barcelona fans labor under the touchingly innocent belief that everyone else in the world, apart from Real Madrid and Espanyol fans, is happy to accept that their club is the biggest on earth and quite simply the bees' knees of the whole footballing cosmos.”

“There is so much morbo festering between these two sides that they would have to employ a very powerful priest to exorcise the phenomenon, always presuming that they wanted to. It's not merely that they hate each other with an intensity that can truly shock the outsider, but that each encounter between them always has a new ingredient. This is the essence of morbo. It feeds off itself and keeps growing until it becomes a self-regulating and self-perpetuating organism, like some sinister creature from a science fiction fantasy.”

“The essential absurdity of football - that it has become so important - is nine-tenths of the poetry.”

“Regions remembered who had fought for whom, and they have not forgotten. Football grounds grew up out of the divided earth and have not forgotten either.”

“The great artists and poets may have gone, but football is here.”