Morbo Quotes

“The terrible beauty of Spanish football is that someone, somewhere, hates your guts and will always be delighted to demonstrate this when your team comes to town.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football

“In Coruña, people sit around on the sea walls or the rocks and stare out to sea, as if they expect Francis Drake to turn up again and sack the city. A contemplative lot, the Galicians.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football

“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.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football

“The essential absurdity of football - that it has become so important - is nine-tenths of the poetry.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good national legend.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football

“Que se jodan.'It was as if the girl had summed up, in three words, the way Spanish regions really feel about each other.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football

“I reserve the right to do what I like" he (Manuel Ruíz de Lopera) announced to the press, a statement that rather sums up the moral state of the game in Spain.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football

“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.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football

“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.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football

“The great artists and poets may have gone, but football is here.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football

“The presence of the 14 Basques was a fairly accurate reflection of the region’s overwhelming influence on the early years of Spanish football. There are tales told, similar to those of the north-east of England, in which scouts in the region are forever hollering down holes in the ground, out of which would pop monstrous defenders, solid goalkeepers and prodigious goalscorers. In fact the Spanish talk of the cantera (quarry) from which good young ’uns emerge, hewn from the rock of their particular regions. The Basques have always had more cause to celebrate the philosophy of the cantera than most, due to their insistence, from the early years of the century, on using only local players in their teams. This policy is still carried on by Athletic Bilbao, courting controversy in certain circles because their approach has always been coloured by suggestions of Basque racial purity and xenophobia – predictably and strenuously denied by those who support the practice.”
― Phil Ball, Morbo - The Story of Spanish Football