The Spanish are really into sports. Football (Soccer) especially. There are numerous newspapers dedicated solely to sports, and of course every regular newspaper has its sports section too. TV news programs also have sports sections and there are even 30 or 60 minute sports reports on regular channels.
One cool feature of the soccer leagues here is that after every season the worst teams in the first league move down to the second league and the best of the lower league move up. I feel like this makes the 2nd league actually interesting, in contrast to, say, minor league baseball, in which even if you are the champions, you're still just champions of the minor league and are condemned to stay there and lose all your best players to your major league patron. I guess this is all a historical thing cause the minor leagues of baseball have their origins in farm teams.
Vigo's team is called Real Club Celta de Vigo, and while in the past it was really good, and played in European leagues and stuff, now it's in the second league. So most people here also support a team from La Liga. Basically you have to choose either Real Madrid or Barcelona, since these are by far the most dominant teams in the league. You can find Madrid and Barcelona paraphernalia in all the shops here. In my school it seems to be about a 80-20 split favoring Barça. The kids always ask me what my team is, or to phrase it the Spanish way, of what team I am. I dodge this controversial question by claiming to be of Sevilla.
A lot of the teams here have odd English names like Athletic Club, Racing (pronounced Rah-thing), or Sporting. Then there's Real Betis Balompié, which uses an unusual but really more authentically Spanish word for football-- balompié instead of futbol. See, all the other sports names seem to be calqued from English-- so that basketball is baloncesto (balón = ball, cesto = basket), handball is balonmano-- and so logically football should be balón+pié=balompié.
Tennis is pretty popular too since the Spanish players are so dominant.
The NBA is actually a big deal here which always suprises me. You always see NBA recaps on tv. There are a few Spanish players in the NBA so the coverage always features them disproportionately. And by disproportionately I mean that they take up like 90% of the time.
Below you can see some translated excerpts from an article in El Mundo about the connection between politics and football. It focuses especially on the rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC.
In Catalonia, Real Madrid's refusal to allow the final of the Copa del Rey, in which Barça and Athletic de Bibao will play, to be held in Bernabéu [Real Madrid's stadium] has been interpreted as a gesture against Catalan nationalism. Catalan and Basque independentist groups, for their part, have announced that they'll take advantage of the fact that the final will be held in Madrid, in Vicente Calderón stadium, to hold a large sovereignist rally. Football and Politics join hands.
Many first-generation Spanish immigrants in Catalonia support Real Madrid to show their disagreement with and opposition to Catalan nationalism. On the other hand, the majority of the second generation are staunch followers of Barça. This is similar to what happened in the days of Franco with the children of the Guardias Civiles, born in Catalonia or the Basque Country, who were usually Anti-Franquists, revolutionaries and radical nationalists; they needed to seek forgiveness for being the children of a repressive force against nationalism and its symbols. Foreign immigrants shout with Barça fans for their team and against Real Madrid, or vice versa, to prove their will to identify with the country that has accepted them. Peripheral nationalists accuse Real Madrid fans of being centralists.
Within Catalonia, there are different ways of understanding nationalism, each fighting to take the reins of the club, and this is reflected in the club's history. Nuñez represented the independence of the institution. "He didn't let politicians influence anything in the club, that's why they threw him out," many people have told me. With Laporta, independentism took over the club. The repercussions of Guardiola's [the current coach] words in favor of Laporta's management aren't due to the words themselves, but because they're viewed as support for a certain political position. About Rossel, people think he's nationalist but not independentist.
With Athletic de Bilbao, things are a little more complicated because of the existence of ETA and the various currents of nationalism in the Basque Country. Of course, no one considers Bilbao to be the team of ETA. In Galicia, the independentist party is the BNG [Galician Nationalist Bloc], but it doesn't identify with either Deportivo de Coruña or Celta de Vigo, the symbolic teams. Outside of Spain, those who view Catalonia as a nation subjected to Spain defend Barcelona, and those who view Catalonia as just another region of Spain could be supporters of Madrid or of Barcelona."
Manuel Mandianes, "Fútbol, tensión nacionalista." El Mundo, March 16 2012.
UPDATE: Apropos of all this I thought I would record a song I heard some students singing on the bus, which is a parody version of the Real Madrid anthem:
"Hala Madrid, Hala Madrid, el equipo del gobierno, la vergüenza del país"
"Let's go Madrid, Let's go Madrid, the team of the government, the shame of the country"
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