European Football, La Liga, and Diplomacy

When one moves from country to country  one must become a  local sports fan. This is very important to be in good terms with the natives. I've been very lucky because the Spanish  professional football league is the best in the world.  It is very pleasant to live in a country where everyone knows the game and can talk in depth about it and where the national team always wins.

 I have jumped head first into football,  and spend hours watching the games on television. I don’t go watch them at  the nearby  bar, because here in Alicante most fans are rabid Qatar followers, and I am a loyal supporter of Jinko and Bwin.

 

To show you  how good local soccer can be, a few days ago I had the  great pleasure of seeing  a tremendous  game between the Spanish team  Bwin, led by the Portuguese Mourinho, against the English  team Chevrolet.

 

The latter has a very old coach called Sir Alex, who was very gentlemanly  and polite after the Spanish beat Chevrolet 2-1 in Manchester. All of this because  the Portuguese player  Luís Carlos Almeida da Cunha (Nani)  kicked  Spanish defender Alvaro Albeloa in the chest.

Nani was given a red card for this outrage, which I’m sure scared little Alba,  Albeloa’s daughter, when she saw the blow the savage Nani had inflicted on  her father.  The game was very enjoyable after that. The Chevrolet were reduced to ten players and proceeded to lose like God ordains.  This allowed the Bwin  to move on to  the next round in the Champions League, and left the dreaded English out of the competition.

But wait, there is more… for those who don’t  keep up,   Chevrolet is the best team in the Premier League, and  by far. But Bwin was only  third in the Spanish league at the time. First was the Qatar team, and second was  Azerbaijan.

It gets better. The day after the Bwin victory over the Chevrolet, I could see the fifth place  team in the Spanish league, my beloved  Jinko,  tie a hard fought game  in its opponent’s  stadium, the French giant Fly Emirates. The French are led  by the superb  Swede footballer  Zlatan Ibrahimovic. They were second in the French league  just behind Southern  France.

 

The European football leagues are great, because they  are located in countries that spend huge amounts paying  stratospheric salaries. For example, the best German team,  Telekom,  has  Mario Gomez playing behind  Croat  Mario Mandzukic.  A player like Gomez would not be sitting on the bench  in a normal team, but  Telekom has so much money, they  can afford to sit  Gomez just in case Mandzukic falls down.

Another team I want to mention is the Italian leader Jeep, whose best  scorers are Montenegrin Mirko Vucinic and Frenchman Nicolas Anelka.  Anelka is playing in Italy after returning to Europe from  capitalist China (what we called communist China during the Mao era). The Chinese, in spite of being  rich, could not pay what the Italian Jeep offered Anelka.

And that is why I like both football here, the best players in the world give  exhibition after exhibition of  superb skills with  feet and head which can’t  be seen in other continents, not even in Brazil.  They jump from country to country and mix together,  and this is what I call European sports diplomacy. There is no way that an Italian, an English or  a German can be reckless or rude with someone from another country when the chances are that his or her football  hero is a foreign player.  So  that's what happens to most of them, they become very polite people.  And this  includes Spain,  because despite being the best ever in terms of the quality of its players,  Spain  has Leonardo Messi from  Argentina dominating  the league together with his great team,  Qatar.

 

Nomenclature of European football:

Barcelona: Qatar

Real Madrid: Bwin

Valencia: Jinko

Manchester United: Chevrolet

Paris Saint Germain: Fly Emirates

Atletico Madrid: Azerbaijan

Bayern Munich: Telekom

Juventus: Jeep