Fury and Failure in Spanish Football Stories of the 1960s

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Spanish sports media and government representatives often employed a ‘fury and failure narrative’ to attribute Spain’s successes on the football pitch to certain national traits and blame its failures on outside forces and bad luck (Quiroga, 2013). This article explores the role of sport fiction as an element of this portrayal during the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), which linked the narrative to fascist ideals of masculinity and of sport as an instrument of the regime. In the early 1960s, authors Camilo José Cela, Rafael García Serrano, Francisco García Pavón, and Manuel Pilares incorporated the fury and failure narrative into several soccer-themed short stories. These authors looked back with nostalgia at the sport’s origins while criticising the darker sides of the modern game. The freedom of the short story to move in time and space reinforces football literature’s function within sports writing as a means of going beyond the action on the pitch and complicating a simplified story of winners and losers.