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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”