Print Interview with Sid Lowe

If you are interested in Spanish Football, chances are you’ll know who Sid Lowe is. His weekly column on the Guardian is a must for anyone with a passion for the Spanish game, as is his usual spot on the Guardian’s Football Weekly Podcast, where Sid delights the team and its many listeners with expert analysis on the weekend’s games from La Liga with a few ‘caveats’ and ‘hang on a minutes’ thrown in for good measure, all delivered over the background of Madrid hustle and bustle or the barking of his dog Stella. We caught up with him just before Atletico Madrid’s 2-3 loss to Espanyol at the Vicente Calderón at the end of November to disuss the plight of these two sides, atmospheres in Spanish stadiums as well as the problem of racism in Spanish sport.

If you enjoy this interview you can hear a separate audio interview with Sid over in our latest podcast:

http://www.spanishfootball.info/2010/12/new-podcast-interview-with-sid-lowe/

What brought you to Spain and how did you end up writing about Spanish football?
My route’s a particularly unusual route, for a journalist anyway. What brought me here in theory was a Phd on Spanish political history in the 1930s. That got left by the wayside a bit with the football writing and then in particular with the arrival of David Beckham, which blew everything out of the water. So that’s what brought me here although I was already doing football writing in bits and bobs, almost all of it based in Spain.

Did you study Spanish at University?
Yeah my degree was Spanish and History. I did a year abroad studying in Oviedo in 1996/97 which is the year that Ronaldo, the original Ronaldo, was at Barcelona and he was just frighteningly good. It was also the year that a guy called Oli scored 15 or so goals for Oviedo that season and got in the Spanish national team, which for a team like Oviedo was big news. It was a great year, a really fun year.

Summarize a typical working week for you
It’s difficult because my working week’s not very typical. There are certain things that are set in stone but largely you cant always predict what’s gonna happen and what you’re gonna have to do. In very brief terms my working week involves seeing a hell of a lot of football, trying to talk to a lot of footballers, but normally failing because with every passing day football clubs are more closed, reading a hell of a lot of media and speaking to other people involved with the game who aren’t footballers, and they’ll actually give you a better insight into the game than the players do, and spending a lot of time in front of a computer.
I’m also involved in Real Madrid TV where I am on two programmes. One is a weekly discussion in which three journalists argue, discuss and talk about various things to do with Real Madrid and La Liga and I’m one of the guests. The other programme is a preview for the Real Madrid game and for the weekend’s football in Spain where we talk about tactics, how the teams are going to line up, etc.

We’re at Atlético Madrid v Espanyol, two teams that forever live in the shadow of their neighbours. Could either team ever finish above their neighbours again?
No, in the short term, unless something major changes with the structure of Spanish football. Or you could have one freak season. But the short answer is no.

Can Espanyol keep up the excellent start they’ve made to the season?
To be honest I don’t expect them to but that’s part of the reason why I’m here tonight, to try and watch them very closely, get a clear idea of how they play, try and talk to some of them afterwards. If you look at their stats, they’re very poor away from home and at home, while their stats are very good, broadly I think they’ve played against sides that aren’t actually that good. So I expect them to fall by the wayside, but I’ve been very impressed with what they’ve done so far. I expect them to finish in 7th or 8th but I don’t expect them to finish in the Champions League spots.

Now let’s talk about Atlético. They’re supposed to be moving into a brand new, 73,000 capacity stadium in 2013, do you think they might be able to challenge at the top in the next few years?
No, probably not, because I think the key to a genuine concerted challenge over a period of time is a redistribution of television rights money, which will happen, but won’t be profound enough to make the league competitive beyond Madrid and Barcelona. Atlético are the best team to do it, because according to the current proposal, they and Valencia are the two teams that would get the biggest amount of money beyond Madrid and Barcelona. In that sense they’d be well placed. I’m also not convinced that moving to a new stadium is the catch-all solution that some of the club’s directors seem to believe. I also think it runs the risk of losing something that Atlético have that makes them stronger than other clubs, and that’s identity. This is a club that’s very clear about commitment to the club, what it represents, what it stands for, and it concerns me that going to a new stadium won’t destroy that, but will undermine it.

There’s also the fact that they’re moving from the South of Madrid to the North East of the city…
I think that’s a real problem. They would argue, and they may well be right, that they’d open up a brand new catchment area for themselves, so those people that grew up with Atlético would stay with them, but they’d also get new fans in the North East who think ‘Well, we’ve got La Peineta next to us, let’s go to the ground.’ I think that support they have in this part of Madrid (that in the South of Madrid and near the Calderón) is possibly only valid for one generation after leaving this stadium, so that could be problematic.

Can you see a team aside from Real Madrid and Barcelona ever winning the league again?
Ever again, yeah, because who knows what might happen? Perhaps the best example now is Malaga, they’ve got an extraordinarily wealthy new owner from Qatar. At the moment they’re being quite cautious. They spent a lot of money by Spanish standards last summer, but nowhere near enough to challenge Madrid and Barcelona. I think it was something like €18 or €19m, which made them the fifth highest spender in Spain but still 60 or 70 million off Barca and Real Madrid, so they’ve still got no chance. But, if we were to have foreign investors with pots and pots of cash, then who knows? But, structurally I think it’s very hard to see Barcelona and Madrid not winning the next ten, fifteen or even twenty league titles.

Which players have impressed you so far this season?
Let’s ignore Barca and Madrid because they’re far too obvious. I’ve been massively impressed by a few players at Villarreal. Santi Cazorla, he’s a player that I’ve got an enormous spot for, not least because he began his career with Real Oviedo. He’s playing fantastically well after an injury and I think it’s a real pity that, because of fitness, he wasn’t able to go to the World Cup, because I think he’s a brilliant player and a very likeable lad. He’s playing very well, Borja Valero’s playing very well, Giussepe Rossi too. Bruno Soriano is a player that I like the look of, obviously Nilmar as well. At Atleti, well obviously Kun Aguero and Forlán, but neither of them have been playing particularly well so maybe you’d argue Reyes, although I still think he’s hot and cold. I like the look of Fredi Kanoute in midfield rather than as a forward, that’s a very interesting experiment, I don’t know if it’ll work but it’s working at the moment. Those are the players that really stand out at the moment.
There’s something quite gratifying about seeing a player you know nothing about and at the end of the game you think “Bloody hell that number 3’s been good”. And a player who’s done that the most for me has been Jon Aurtenetxe, the left back at Athletic Bilbao. I think it’s a tragedy that they didn’t start him against Real Madrid at the Bernabéu, to be honest I think Caparros (Athletic Bilbao’s manager) bottled it.

Last year you said on Football Weekly that you got into a bit of trouble with Real Mallorca for saying ‘they should be rubbish, but they’re not’. Have you resolved that problem?
No, oddly enough, it’s gotten worse. After that column which, I think in truth the problem was started by being picked up by El Mundo and they focused on the word ‘rubbish’ and not on the foundation of the piece, which was saying that, given their financial problems and given the fact that their players leave every year, they should have been a poor team, or a rubbish team, and they weren’t, they were doing fantastically well, they had a coach that had done fantastically well. To cut a very long story short it seems that I waded into a war which I wasn’t aware of that now we’ve seen with the departure of Manzono from the club and the extremely bitter fallout from that. I think that what probably deep down upset them more than anything else was the fact that I spoke so highly of Manzano. I think that irritated a lot of people. But there’s that and the fact that they focused on the word rubbish. There was an exchange of emails between me and the federation of supporters of Mallorca , with the club, and despite that neither of those saw fit to publish my replies but did see it fit to publish their initial criticisms, so the thing snowballs, and then there was a rather disagreeable event at Real Madrid’s game with Mallorca on the opening day of the season. So no, it hasn’t been resolved, unfortunately.

Have you ever pissed off any other clubs?
As a journalist it’s impossible not to piss off anyone, I’ve had a couple of clubs say ‘well that wasn’t quite fair’. I think one thing that’s worth pointing it out is that if I get it wrong it’s because I cock it up rather than because I’m trying to destroy someone. But in Spain sometimes it’s impossible to believe that, because the media is so partisan. So I haven’t had that many problems with clubs, what I have had is fans on message boards saying ‘oh he clearly hates us’ and then the fans of their rivals say ‘oh no, he hates us’ and ultimately, you’re left with a situation where you don’t hate anyone but there’s a belief that you’re out to get everyone, which of course isn’t true, but you have to live with that.

On that note you also wrote the article about the Spanish Basketball team that was going to the Olympics in China posing for a poster in Marca where the players posed with their fingers holding their eyes, trying to imitate Chinese people. Did that piss off a lot of people in Spain?
Yes it did and I think that story irritated people probably with some degree of justification. I think there was a bit of a culture clash there, which, in truth, I didn’t handle particularly well in terms of not fully appreciating the Spanish perspective on it. However it’s worth responding to some of the criticisms aimed at me. One of which was that I was trying to ruin Spain’s chances of hosting the Olympic games in 2016 and that this was a conspiracy. The obvious response is ‘I’m a sports journalist working in Madrid, if Madrid hosted the Olympics it’d be fucking brilliant for me, how stupid would I have to be to be trying to ruin their bid”?
But from a news point of view it was a very straightforward story and the language I used was very neutral, it wasn’t accusatory at all,. But it’s also worth pointing out that there was a paragraph that wasn’t included, which said that the Spanish see this as a gesture of solidarity and even as a welcoming gesture. That paragraph went, and, of course, is precisely what the Spanish basketball federation said and so my interpretation of ‘this is what they’re trying to say’ was missing from the final piece and that didn’t do me any favours.

On the subject of racial attitudes in Spain, in 2004 England played Spain in a friendly at the Bernabéu where Ashley Cole and Sean Wright Phillips were subjected to monkey taunts. Has the situation in Spain regarding racism in sport improved since then?
For a while it got worse because it became seen as a fashionable way to have a go at players. It was almost as a lot of people thought ‘Wow, this really pisses people off, let’s do it!’. I think some Spanish fans didn’t see it as a racist gesture so much as a gesture to wind up opposition players, no more different to calling someone an ‘hijo de puta’ (son of a whore) or calling an overweight player ‘fatty’. But, I think the hoo-ha that that caused lead to a process of rethinking to some extent and I think it has changed and I think in the long run it might have done some good. Some sections of the media dealt with it very well, some dealt with it very badly. One paper which I thought dealt with it very well, a paper that I don’t normally praise, was AS, lead by Alfredo Relano, their editor. I thought their handling of it was very positive.

Do you still go to watch Real Oviedo?
I’ve not been to see Oviedo play at home for quite a long time. Last year when they were playing in La Segunda B in the Madrid based group I saw them play six or seven times, a couple of times I saw them in the derby in Gijón against Sporting B in el Molinón, against Atletico’s B team, against Madrid’s B team, I saw them in the Copa del Rey against Toledo, against Alcala, against Legane, so I see them a lot, but not very often at home.
Right now Oviedo is in genuine risk of disappearing, which, beyond the fact that I support them, would be a tragedy. My initial connection to them was very simple, it was just living in Oviedo for a year. They now are in a terrible, terrible way. They, like so many other clubs, have been fucked over by a series of incompetent owners. Their fans are a model to fans everywhere, they more or less single handedly rescued them in 2003 when they were in danger of going out of business . But the situation has got worse and now there’s a genuine risk of them going out of business again, which would be a tragedy.

Your English team, is it Liverpool?
Yeah, although to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve got to the stage where I’m so removed from it that it’s almost irrelevant now. One of the tragedies of being a football writer is that what was your hobby sometimes becomes your job, and you lose a little bit of that.

Has Spanish interest in Liverpool waned since Benitez and Alonso left?
Yeah of course it has, without any doubt. One of the best ways of measuring that is to look at how everyone’s talking about Schalke 04, because Raul’s there, simple as that.

So if Torres and Reina were to go would all interest in them disappear?
Yeah I think it would go almost entirely if they were to leave, but equally, if they signed another big name player it might increase again. I do think though that it’s important to not be completely cynical about it and say that the vast majority of Spanish colleagues that I’ve got that have been to Anfield always come back and say “Wow, this stadium is genuinely special”. It’s easy to be cynical about it if you’re English and say all this bollocks about the Kop and ‘This is Anfield’, but from a Spanish point of view, when they go there they really are struck by it and they think it’s something different.

Andy Mitten has said that football fans in Spain aren’t as good at supporting their team as they are in England, do you agree?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by good. If you go to a ground in Spain expecting a brilliant atmosphere, you won’t get it in a lot of stadiums, in particular the big two, Barcelona and Real Madrid. I’ll make a number of exceptions. The Sanchez Pizjuan in Sevilla is brilliant, the Vicente Calderón tends to be good, although it’s up and down, and there are great stadiums in Spain, the Molinón in Gijón is a brilliant place to visit. It depends what you want from your fans, of course, but broadly speaking I’d agree with Andy.