La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World

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La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World

3.55 of 5 stars 3.55 · rating details · 80 ratings · 18 reviews

"La Roja" is bestselling author Jimmy Burns tremendous opus on Spanish soccer. From its early beginnings when the first soccer on the shores of Bilbao and Buenos Aires was played by British sailors and engineers, through to the influx of South American stars, and similarly inspirational Italians, Dutchman and Scandinavians, Burns show how the engagement of foreigners with...more

Paperback, 384 pages

Published May 29th 2012 by Nation Books (first published May 1st 2012)

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Mar 30, 2013 Ty rated it 4 of 5 stars

i love books about soccer and this one was a fascinating mix of soccer and the cultural/political dynamics of Spain from the time that soccer was introduced to the country by the Brits in the late 1800's to the current time of the Euro and World Cup winning Spanish national teams.
the book focuses, as any discussion of Spanish futbol inevitably will, on the enduring rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid, tracing the paths of each from founding through the Spanish Civil War, the Franco years,...more

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Jul 15, 2012 John rated it 3 of 5 stars

A very detailed history of soccer in Spain both at the club and national team levels. I was impressed with Burns’ research and even more impressed with his interviews. Over the course of the last decade he has interviewed nearly every important person in Spanish soccer who is still alive. What the book lacked for me was the verve and spice to add interest to the topic. The book is not badly written, just a little dull.

What surprised me most about the book was the down-playing of the political t...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Hector A is currently reading it

LA ROJA
The purpose of “La Roja” is to let know the reader more about a sport that took over Spain. It was a sport that many people from Spain enjoy playing. Their favorite sport was soccer, it changed many peoples life’s in a positive way. It says that “millions of people view the sport and many of them gather at the capital to welcome their team back.”(page 1) They welcomed Spain’s team back because they went to the 2010 World Cup. The people living in this country were very excited and happ...more LA ROJA
The purpose of “La Roja” is to let know the reader more about a sport that took over Spain. It was a sport that many people from Spain enjoy playing. Their favorite sport was soccer, it changed many peoples life’s in a positive way. It says that “millions of people view the sport and many of them gather at the capital to welcome their team back.”(page 1) They welcomed Spain’s team back because they went to the 2010 World Cup. The people living in this country were very excited and happy to be recognized as one of the best teams to go to the world cup. It takes a lot for a team to get to this level. This book would get anyone interested and wanting to keep reading it. It teaches you a lot about the importance of soccer and the way people got popular through it.
This book will have a positive impact on the audience. It will have a positive impact on the audience because it talks about the important teams of Spain. It also talks about the teams that lead the country to the champion leagues and the world cups. One of Spain’s most important team is Barcelona. In the book the author talks about its rival real Madrid which is also part of Spain. These teams are both part of Spain but when it comes to soccer they are rivals. The book says that “no matter where they faced each other, the sport was always an intensely partisan.”(page 195) The people supported both team because they are both great teams but at the end the sport that they were playing is what matter. They loved to be entertained by 2 of the best teams in the world. Each year both teams had their records, but what matter was that they were both part of Spain. It can teach the audience about how important the sport was to the people in Spain.
The book was well written; it caught people’s attention to keep reading it. The people that are interested in the soccer are really going to enjoy this book. It takes people back to the time the sport was first played. It takes them back to the 1880’s and the people that were involved in the sport. It talks about the cities that the sport was played in. The cities that they played in were Madrid, Barcelona, Busque, Catalan and more. This book also talks about the way each city had its own country and their language. It also talks about the legends that made the sport very famous and exciting. I believe the books main focus was on the people that played the sport, politicians and mainly their fans. It gives interesting biographies about each good player. It lets the reader know about the amazing people that existed during this 80’s. The sport would’ve never been as famous if it wasn’t because of the fans. They are the ones that come out and support the players playing the beautiful sport.
I would recommend this book to many of my friends. They enjoy playing soccer and they also have their favorite players. One of my closes friend favorite players is Beckham. In the book they talk about Beckham going to play at Spain. He is one the best players in the world and also the highest pay. Real Madrid was willing to pay for as much money as he asked. They talk about Beckham going to play in Spain. It says “one question is if Beckham would ever be part of Real Madrid.”(page 295) I’m sure my friend would enjoy seen Beckham play for Real Madrid. That is his favorite team and his favorite player. Beckham been part of Spain made history. He helped Real Madrid and he also helped Spain become more famous.
I enjoy this book, especially because it was soccer and that’s my favorite sport. It talked about how Spain made history in soccer and so many of soccer’s good players. It gives you history of every important game that Spain was part of and the games that were won by them. It would’ve been better if the book had more pictures so I could see the people and the teams. I was still able to visualize what happen during certain events and I also visualize the players. I knew half of the ones mentioned in the book and that helped me more. It was a very interesting and great book about the way soccer was spread all over the world. I enjoyed it and I know whoever else reads the book will enjoy it too.

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Jul 13, 2012 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Delving, as it does, into Spain, "La Roja," has as much to do with politics as with that country's world champion national soccer team.

Jimmy Burns has written an amenable yet substantive story about how Spain went from a bullfighting nation to kings of international football.

He goes way back to the 1880s and an English-owned mine in Huelva where the first games of football were played exclusively by Brits. The journalistic knitting continues as Basque teams assert primacy and then Argentines co...more Delving, as it does, into Spain, "La Roja," has as much to do with politics as with that country's world champion national soccer team.

Jimmy Burns has written an amenable yet substantive story about how Spain went from a bullfighting nation to kings of international football.

He goes way back to the 1880s and an English-owned mine in Huelva where the first games of football were played exclusively by Brits. The journalistic knitting continues as Basque teams assert primacy and then Argentines come to enliven the game with a quick passing style.

"La Roja" is about the places where such trends were born and the people who sowed them on Spanish soil.

Burns's chronicling of Barcelona F.C's role as an expression of Catalan culture and its rivalry with Real Madrid is deftly woven into discussion of the defeated Republic, the Monarchy, the Falange and, poignantly, the names of soccer players killed during the Spanish Civil War.

Noteworthy, too, is Burns's analysis of the Franco dictatorship's aggressive engagement with football as a tool to soothe tensions on the Iberian peninsula, as a propaganda weapon, and as diplomatic entry to worlds otherwise closed to the regime.

Burns suggests Franco made the Spanish national team a projection of homegrown fascism. A group possessing the "racial" qualities of true and pure Spaniards, and which brought to the playing field a particular "Spanish Fury." A sobriquet that stuck.

Like many people in Spain who had little time for the national selection over the years, Burns believes that the "The Spanish Fury" amounted to a whole lot of nothing, and that success in world-class tournaments would be elusive until a more modern and technical conception of Spanish soccer could be born.

Of course it happened. "La Roja" was released on the occasion of a repeat European Cup championship for the team of the same nickname. An unprecedented kind of success for such a national outfit.

Although his lead-up to the latest and most glorious chapter in Spanish soccer is first-rate, this reviewer did not find Burns very clear on why the ultimate transformation occurred.

Was it a special generation of players who learned how to transcend the rivalries carried over from the club level? Ditching Raul? Was it David Beckham's impact as a media and celebrity item on future Spanish stars? The Argentines?

Maybe it's in there, but in any case, "La Roja" remains an always engaging look at a sudden dynasty. Its author understands soccer as culture and an expression of collective identities without forgetting that it is still sport. (less)

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Dec 28, 2012 Josh Brown rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: spain-flamenco

Burns provides a great deal of information regarding the history of Spanish players, rivalries, and clubs as well as an overall history and evolution of soccer on Spanish soil. He tends to skip around quite a bit, but I suppose that is to be expected in a book of this sort. He also repeats himself many times - and when I say "repeat", I mean essentially cut and paste his own words repeatedly to describe subjects in identical phrases over and over (sometimes even in the same chapter, as the case...more

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Jul 05, 2012 Tag Garibay rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a great book, especially for a lover of the game of football (soccer). Burns details how the main European sport brought the people of Spain, under the Republic and under General Franco. This book shows the history of soccer in spain from the pure spanish Real Madrid, the only-basque team of Athletic Bilbao, to the pride of Catalonia, FC Barcelona. Burns provides history of the game, its great figures and accomplishments, leading up to the great triumph of the 2010 South Africa World Cu...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Steven Pilling rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is a hard book to review , Burns is very good on Spanish football but the scope that the book has to cover is too broad.

It lacks a sense of society or spain, the format selecting key people works but you feel its like skimming a pebble over the water rather than diving in, you want more information you want more context but it isnt here.

It will give you some facts you dont know it will give you some information but it wont make you think bloody hell i need more information.

This book is poo...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Raul rated it 2 of 5 stars

That a book like this exists is a good thing. Unfortunately, the author fails in weaving the history of Spanish soccer into a cohesive narrative and instead reduces the subject to a laundry list of anecdotes and soccer celebrities: "There was this coach who did this and that. Oh, there was also this other player that...And that reminds me of this story where..." As proof of the meandering, incohesive style of this book, there are literally paragraphs in this book that begin with the phrase: "But...more That a book like this exists is a good thing. Unfortunately, the author fails in weaving the history of Spanish soccer into a cohesive narrative and instead reduces the subject to a laundry list of anecdotes and soccer celebrities: "There was this coach who did this and that. Oh, there was also this other player that...And that reminds me of this story where..." As proof of the meandering, incohesive style of this book, there are literally paragraphs in this book that begin with the phrase: "But back to [the topic I was talking about]..."

But the biggest problem with this book are the myriad of typos, misspellings and grammatical errors in the Spanish names and phrases used within. You cannot claim to be an authority on any Spanish subject if you cannot spell correctly the names of people and places. "Bonanova", a district in Barcelona, is not the same as "Bovavona"; and it's not "La Campa" but "El Campo"; and, as anyone who speaks Spanish knows, accents are important, yet in this book the accents on the names of some people are altogether missing, and when correctly spelled, some times the accent on a name shows up only to disappear later in the next few pages...

This leads me to the biggest gripe I have with this book: you cannot write a book that has F.C. Barcelona as one of its major subjects and misspell the club's affectionate nickname, "Barça", for the entire 300+ pages of the book and refer to the team as "Barca". That little "ç" is very important grammatically, phonetically and culturally.

"Barça" is an affectionate, Catalan abbreviation of "Barcelona" that fans use to refer to the soccer team. It uses a special Catalan language symbol, the "broken c", which symbolizes the cultural identity of the Catalan language and culture much in the same way that the "ñ" has come to symbolize all things Spanish.

To ignore this and simply refer to "Barça" as "Barca" is an insult to all Catalans and Barcelona fans. And, well, it shows the ignorance and hurts the credibility of the author who cannot be bothered to refer to the soccer team by its correct name, which is, on top of it all, spelled out correctly in all the team's official soccer merchandise! All the author had to do was read the name on a track jacket or on a uniform...

"Barca" without the "broken c" just means row boat. To read 300+ where (arguably) the world's best soccer team is referred to as a row boat is just annoying...Ugh

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Jul 23, 2012 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sports

If you don't know anything about Spanish soccer prepare to be bombarded with the names of many Spaniards and Englishmen you will soon forget. This is a very comprehensive look at the growth of soccer in Spain, at times enthralling and at other times sleep inducing. I wish there were more pictures of some of the characters described in this book and by characters I really mean characters. The coach who brought two national rivals together for the World Cup win in 2010, Vincente Del Bosque, lots o...more

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Aug 15, 2012 Julie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

While I really enjoyed this book, I realize that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Burns offers a detailed account of Spanish national soccer, from its beginning by English colonials to the current World Cup-winning team. The short chapters make it pretty easy to read, and they cover a variety of political and social issues that have affected the development of Spanish soccer, from the underlying tensions between Basques, Catalans, and Castilians, and the meaning of what it is to be Spanish; the S...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Keith rated it 4 of 5 stars

A history of a century of Spanish soccer, from its humble beginnings to La Roja's 2010 World Cup victory. While the book covers a lot of ground, one consistent focus is the two super club teams Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. While at times dense with detail, this is a must-read for any soccer fan or anyone interested in Spanish culture and history.

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Sep 27, 2012 Rod rated it 3 of 5 stars

A history of football in Spain. I'm quite ignorant of Spanish history, but found it interesting how much of Spanish football ( and everything else, apparently) were impacted by the Civil War and how regionalized football in Spain was.

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Jul 31, 2012 Victor rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you're interested in a cursory knowledge of the Spanish game, this is the book for you. A good, quick historical look at the development of Spanish soccer from the late 1800s to current times. The short, compact chapters make it an easy read.

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Dec 23, 2012 Omar Alqayyeh rated it 5 of 5 stars

Best book about spanish football

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Sep 02, 2012 Kevin Mcshane rated it 3 of 5 stars

some good history of Spanish futbol, but the writing is not very engaging.

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Nov 09, 2012 Rob Innis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Well researched and supported with lots of interviews, in depth analysis of the whole Spanish football culture. Jimmy Burns was born in Madrid and is passionate about this topic. Well worth reading - even if you are not a football fan as it is all part of the Spanish scene.

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Sep 18, 2012 Stu Liv rated it 2 of 5 stars

For all my love of Spanish football, I didn't particularly enjoy la Roja. I feel that it skirted all over the place without ever really delving into significant detail. "El Morbo" tackles the same subject, but engaged me a lot more.

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Nov 04, 2012 Jackie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-nonfiction, sports, travel

According to this book, God made Athletic Bilbao on the 8th day, and Franco was an idiot lunatic. I hear both are correct.

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Jan 14, 2013 Lisa Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

I learned a great deal about soccer.

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May 18, 2013 David Wu added it

May 13, 2013 Manda rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: football

May 18, 2013 Nathaniel Rayestu rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 07, 2013 Andy marked it as to-read · review of another edition

May 03, 2013 Ryan Mehmi rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Apr 26, 2013 Oriol Penya added it · review of another edition

Apr 22, 2013 Jake Nutting rated it 4 of 5 stars

Apr 22, 2013 Zi Wei rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Apr 22, 2013 Weston High School Library marked it as to-read

Apr 19, 2013 Mitch Kukay marked it as to-read

Apr 18, 2013 Leo Susana marked it as to-read

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About Jimmy Burns

From the author's website:

Jimmy Burns was born in Madrid in 1953. His father the late Tom Burns met his mother Mabel Maranon while working in the British embassy in Madrid during the Second World War. Jimmy contributes Spanish language media outlets and publishes his books in Spanish translation as Jimmy Burns Maranon. His childhood was spent straddling cultures -Britain, Castille, and Catalonia....more From the author's website:

Jimmy Burns was born in Madrid in 1953. His father the late Tom Burns met his mother Mabel Maranon while working in the British embassy in Madrid during the Second World War. Jimmy contributes Spanish language media outlets and publishes his books in Spanish translation as Jimmy Burns Maranon. His childhood was spent straddling cultures -Britain, Castille, and Catalonia. He went to school at a British school in Madrid, then a preparatory school in London before studying for his O and A-levels at the Jesuit Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. He took a BA honours degree in Latin American & Iberian Studies at University College, London and an MA in the politics and government of Latin America at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London and The London School of Economics and Political Science. On leaving university, he spent two years teaching English to foreign students, and travelling, gaining experience as a free-lance journalist writing about Latin America and Spain. His early published work included articles for the Catholic Herald and The Tablet. During the 1970's he was commissioned by the BBC to write the script for an Everyman documentary on the Brazilian Archbishop, Helder Camara. He also worked as a researcher for Yorkshire TV, contributing to a critically acclaimed film presented by Robert Kee on the death of Franco and Spain's transition to democracy.

In 1977 Jimmy joined the Financial Times and was posted to Portugal as Lisbon correspondent, reporting also on Spain. He also became a regular contributor to the London Observer, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Economist, as well as the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Radio Nederlands. From 1980-2 he worked for the Financial Times' international desk based in London before being posted to Buenos Aires, as the newspaper's southern cone correspondent.

He arrived in Buenos Aires in the middle of a military palace coup and three months before the invasion of the Falkland Islands by the Argentine armed forces sparked off a three-month war with Britain. He was the only full-time British foreign correspondent to remain in Argentina prior to, during, and well beyond the conflict, covering the country's transition to democracy, as well as political developments in Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. He continued to regularly contribute articles on Latin America to other media outlets in the UK, Europe, and the US.

In mid-1986 he returned to London to work at the Financial Times and prove himself as an author. Advised by his agent Caroline Dawnay, he agreed to be signed up by Liz Calder and Nigel Newton as one of the first authors of the most innovative independent publishing houses to emerge from the 1980's, Bloomsbury, with his book, on Argentina and the Falklands War, The Land that lost its Heroes. It won the 1988 Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction. He followed this up with Beyond the Silver River: South American encounters, based on a collection of personal diaries he kept while living and travelling in South America. In the mid 1990's he was encouraged by David Reynolds and Penny Phillips, then editors at Bloomsbury to write the first full-length biography of Diego Maradona, and subsequently a history of FC Barcelona and the Catalan people. Together with writers like Nick Hornby, Simon Kuper, and Peter Davies, he was praised by the critics for breaking new boundaries in football writing. In between, he was commissioned by John Murray, another independent publisher at the time, to compile and write Spain: A Literary Companion. In Spain, he was co-author of Dossier Diana a book on the death of Princess Diana published by El Pais/Aguilar. In 2002, he published a revised and updated version of The Land that Lost its Heroes, on the 20th anniversary of the Falklands War, while his earlier books led by The Hand of God: The life of Diego Maradona, the first football book by a foreigner to be published in China, foun(less)

More about Jimmy Burns...

Books by Jimmy Burns

Hand of God: The Life of Diego Maradona, Soccer's Fallen Star

Papa Spy: Love, Faith, and Betrayal in Wartime Spain

The Land That Lost Its Heroes: How Argentina Lost the Falklands War

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