Thousands of people were at Mestalla this weekend, huge queues all along Avenida de Aragón where Valencia’s players arrived, but there was no game on, not here. They came instead with water, food and clothes for victims of the greatest natural catastrophe the country has seen: floods that have killed more than 210 people and destroyed towns and lives in the Horta Sud, just inland and south of the city, where a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours. Hundreds of cars and vans turned up and unloaded, and many more made their way by foot. More than a million tonnes of aid filled the space under the stand, silent above them.
Three-and-a-half kilometres away at the Ciutat de València, home of second-division Levante, the scene was much the same. Across the bridges that connect the city to the areas hit hardest, more came, carrying shovels and buckets. On the morning that Valencia had been due to play Real Madrid, 10,000 volunteers gathered at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències, taken by bus to the areas affected, when they could get there at all. In the mud with them were some of the footballers they should have been watching at Mestalla.
On Thursday, the federation ratified La Liga’s decision to postpone Valencia’s game against Madrid and Rayo Vallecano’s visit to Villarreal. In the second division, Levante-Málaga, Castellón-Racing Ferrol and Eldense-Huesca were postponed. On Sunday, as the “Dana” moved towards Andalucía, so was Almería-Cordoba. Everyone else played, though, starting with Alavés against Mallorca on Friday. After five consecutive defeats, Alavés won, but the coach Luis García, who forged his career in the region, from Altea to Villajoyosa, from Villarreal B to Elche and Benidorm, said: “However you look at it, playing this makes no sense.”
He spoke for everyone, his the first voice of many. Getafe’s manager José Bordalás, a man born in Alicante and a man who spent 20 years coaching at smaller teams in the region, said: “These are difficult days for everyone; days pass and we’re still in shock. We see the pictures, hear all sorts of stories and its frightening … Football fans are focused on the tragedy. I don’t know what my colleagues have said, but this round of games shouldn’t have been played.”
Many of Bordalás’s colleagues had said the same. “If I had been taking the decision I might have cancelled it,” Barcelona’s Hansi Flick admitted. “We shouldn’t have played, even if there were no dates [to replay the fixtures on],” insisted the Real Sociedad manager, Imanol Alguacil.
As criticism grew, the league sought to justify its decision to continue. It didn’t talk about the logistics of postponements, the difficulties of finding space in a cramped calendar, or the problems it would cause people – and when have they cared about that anyway? It didn’t say that when the decision had been made it didn’t yet know the full scale of the horror, and it was too late now. Instead, La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas, claimed “the best message is to carry on”. This way, there would be “visibility” and “money raised”. As one colleague put it, sometimes football’s ego is as great as its greed. Its representation and thus its responsibility might be even greater still.
Football is the most important of the less important things, they say. The usual line claims it is put into perspective when life is lost, and that is true, if not always the way it is intended. Because football, like life, tends to go on regardless. It is not alone – this weekend many other events were held, concerts, sports arenas, shops and theatres filled – and it can be easy to point an accusing finger at football alone, held to different standards. But that is at least in part because it claims those standards for itself, embraces its status as the expression of a people, because it is a bit different: a reflection of society, of human emotion, community, identity and belonging. Which is good for the business that truly interests so many in power. “It makes no sense. But we’re in a place where they tell us to carry on and so here we are, carrying on,” Atlético’s Diego Simeone said.
It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that none of it mattered, that no one came and nobody cared. In the first division, 241,503 people attended the seven games played . It wouldn’t be true to say that they didn’t enjoy them either, that there was no drama and no brilliant games – Girona-Léganes and Athletic against Betis certainly were. Nor that there was no emotion, no celebration, no smiles or stories. No atmosphere or sense of occasion, at times. No silliness, even. At Montjuic, where Barcelona won 3-1 against Espanyol and at the Metropolitano where Atlético defeated Las Palmas 2-0, fans fell about laughing as they celebrated Vinícius Júnior winning the “Beach Ball”. The Espanyol coach, Manolo González, said he was “burning inside” at how his team had collapsed, and having to hear Barça fans taunting his team about heading to the second division. And Giuliano Simeone, scorer of his first Atlético goal almost 30 years to the day after his dad, described it as a dream come true.
But none of it felt quite right, and certainly not the same, a guilt in every goal, every explosion of joy. Not least because the disaster was not something that had happened; it was something that was happening. As the weekend went on, and the football did too, the number of people who had lost their lives grew and so did the anger, the feeling of abandonment, that they had been failed. In Paiporta they threw mud at the king; it is all they have. The images kept coming: hard to watch, harder not to. The reports of the mess and the death, the smell. Pictures of the cars, crosses painted on the side to mark those they had checked for bodies; the awareness there were many, many more they had not yet. The fear that, with more than a thousand people still missing, the numbers would increase.
Football is not immune ; although they’re often held up as supermen, accused of living in a bubble where they can’t be touched, players are not invincible. “The images on television are one thing; being there magnifies that five times,” said the Levante coach, Julián Calero, whose town was among those hit. “When these things happen you realise how fragile you are in the face of nature. It has taken so many people.” Valencia defender Rubén Iranzo’s home was flooded. There was solidarity too: the mother of Las Palmas’ Manu Fuster has a restaurant in Quart de Poblet, on the outskirts of Valencia, and fed those in need. The Valencia midfielder Pepelu guided those who needed help to another family restaurant, this time in Chiva.
Pepelu did not play. Nor did Barcelona’s Ferran Torres, born in Foios, north of Valencia. “He said he didn’t feel he could come to the game,” Flick revealed. “Of course it is OK, I totally understand this.” Others who did play felt it was “inhuman”, like the Mallorca full-back Pablo Maffeo. “There are lots of us who have family and friends there, and we know they’re suffering,” he said. “Whoever does the schedule should take a good look at themselves. They’re more interested in money than in us.”
Maffeo’s clubmate, Toni Lato, a former Valencia youth-team player from Pobla de Vallbona, described it as the game that shouldn’t have been played; “I don’t understand it,” he said. “My cousins are suffering, and I would have liked to have been there with them.” He had a word too for José Castillejo, a former teammate at Valencia’s academy, who died in the flooding, aged 28.
On Saturday afternoon, Osasuna beat Valladolid 1-0 to briefly climb into a Champions League place. By Sunday afternoon their manager, Vicente Moreno, was in his home town of Massanassa, shovelling mud. The day before, during the pre-match press conference, he had been in tears. “[Vicente] is devastated,” Osasuna’s sporting director said. “He wasn’t in a fit condition to prepare this game; I honestly don’t know how he did it. He isn’t one to show his emotions but I saw him cry.” Moreno hadn’t been sleeping, his assistant, Dani Pendin, revealed: “We can’t be here talking about a penalty when there are people suffering.”
When Ante Budimir scored that penalty to give Osasuna what ordinarily would have felt like a huge win, teammate Rubén Peña pointed him to a shirt in support of Valencia, which he held up in a scene repeated across the country, the disaster hanging over everything, a hand outstretched.
There were minutes’ silences everywhere, stadiums gathering aid. At the Metropolitano, they played the Valencian anthem and the players held banners from supporters’ clubs in Paiporta and Utiel, two of the towns that suffered the most. Across Spain, players wore T-shirts with Bizum numbers on, encouraging viewers to donate to relief funds. Sevilla’s carried a message of support where their sponsor would usually be.
When Miguel Gutiérrez scored the first for Girona in their 4-3 win over Leganés on Saturday he lifted up a T-shirt with a handwritten message on the front, dedicated to a friend called Henry. “His mum was carried away by the water,” Gutiérrez explained. “I get goosebumps just thinking about the images I have seen. She disappeared and she’s been gone for three days. We hope they can find her still alive but it doesn’t look good.”
The following night, Castellón-born Pablo Fornals scored Betis’s opener in a wild game against Athletic, the last of a weekend that everyone could have done without. As he held up a shirt of solidarity, he cried then and again after. “We can’t control what the climate has in store for us but we can do things better,” he said, his voice breaking. “This wasn’t a day to celebrate anything but, as we had to play, at least we gave people a good night of football.”
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