Fitzpatrick’s odyssey into Spanish tribal war

“I’VE been lucky in my job as a journalist to meet great characters like David Attenborough but Hristo Stoichkov is right up there with them. For the interview, he had an entourage with him. He’s really engaging and charismatic – a real rogue. He’s a great hate figure for Real Madrid supporters and is always very provocative. Stoichkov famously got sent off in one match for stomping on the ref’s foot – he disagreed with the referee’s decision. He’s shameless about it; in the interview, he’s delighted about it. I mention in the book that I know a guy who’d be the same age as me – late 30s – and carries a picture of Stoichkov in his wallet, along with a photo of his girlfriend.”

Ennis-born Richard Fitzpatrick is remembering his recent meeting with Stoichkov, star of the 1990s Barcelona team, whom he interviewed as part of the author’s new book charting the clash between Real Madrid and Barcelona, “football’s greatest rivalry”.
El Cláscio profiles key personnel from both sides of the divide and traces the influence of Spanish Civil War politics and cultural differences on the fractious relationship between these huge clubs.
“I moved to Barcelona in February 2010 and watched the World Cup in the bars in the city,” Mr Fitzpatrick says on the phone from his adopted home. It was a huge thing in Barcelona, you’d imagine. But the reception in the city to their win was lukewarm. I wanted to explore the Catalan separatist question, ‘Why weren’t Barcelona getting behind the Spanish team?’”
That was the first motivation behind the book. The second was José Mourinho’s appointment as manager of Real Madrid in May 2010.
“To use his own parlance, I knew he would add pepper to the fun. I wanted to see also what effect he would have on the rivalry. And, sure enough, within a year he’d become one of the great hate figures in its annals.”
A distinguishing feature of the book is the way the clubs’ feud is portrayed from multiple angles. As well as interviewing former players, managers and club presidents from Barcelona and Real Madrid, Mr Fitzpatrick, a past pupil of St Flannan’s College, talks to a match official, a photographer and an investigative reporter, who infiltrated Real Madrid’s hooligan element.
As many of the interviews were conducted through Spanish, the author engaged professional translators and was helped by friends and his Venezuelan wife, Michelle, a native Spanish speaker, to whom the book is dedicated.
“I did over 60 face-to-face interviews,” he explains. “For the important ones, I brought an interpreter along with me. But I tended not to use them – even though my Spanish was very limited – because it’s disruptive if you’re constantly translating.
“In football interviews, the questions aren’t too complicated and the conversation isn’t too abstract, so it’s quite easy to keep a conversation moving. Then, afterwards, I’d transcribe the interview. I had to do those perfectly: word for word, with the nuances of the conversation and I had translators help me on that.”
A freelance journalist, the softly-spoken Mr Fitzpatrick covers Spanish football for The New York Times and El País and writes arts and feature articles for Irish newspapers.
He signed to the A M Heath agency, which also represents Edna O’Brien, one year into writing the book, an experience he remembers as “all-consuming”.
“It took about two years to write it,” he says. “The brunt of the work was done in the first year, when I wrote the manuscript, the second year was editing. I’d compare it to making a documentary.
“Non-fiction writing is very different to fiction writing. Anne Enright or John Banville or these characters would just disappear up to an attic room and hammer out their work from their imagination. But for non-fiction, all the work is done in the research and in the interviews. There was an awful lot of travelling around Spain, to France and to London for matches.”
El Cláscio reads like a football travelogue, a map of how the tribal war between Barcelona and Real Madrid engulfs the entire country; at least 60% of the population supports one of the clubs.
To capture this, Mr Fitzpatrick meets with members of a Barcelona supporters’ club in Gijon and gets a bus with a Real Madrid supporters’ club to a game in Lyon. Although attending Barcelona-Real Madrid derby matches was thrilling, the mechanics of it presented one of the most difficult parts of the project. “I had a very stressful period for six months trying to organise tickets,” he says. “I went to matches as a fan. I wanted to see it from their perspective, rather than from the press box. To get tickets for these [derby] games was very difficult, particularly because they played four games during 18 days in spring 2011.
“I went to the Champions’ League final between Barcelona and Manchester United at Wembley, as a result of Barcelona beating Madrid in the semi-final. I had to get those tickets. It was do or die.”
Mr Fitzpatrick’s previous book, the “modestly-titled” Where Clare Leads, Ireland Follows, offered intimate portraits of 20 of the county’s leading personalities, from Ger Loughnane to Michael D Higgins and Mick O’Dea. The subject matter of El Cláscio is very different but the author sees certain parallels. I must admit, I was very nervous at the time writing Where Clare Leads. This book was a lot less stressful in this regard: I wasn’t writing about people I knew.
“I would’ve personally known a few of the people I was writing about in the first book and I was interviewing colleagues or friends of those profiled. I was very nervous of upsetting anybody but, at the same time, wanted to write warts-and-all accounts. I was happy that it turned out well and I didn’t lose any friends over it.
“It was a great help to me having studied Ger Loughnane, up close and personal, for then going on to study José Mourinho,” he laughs. “Their antics are very similar. That was a great schooling.”