We are all cowards at the end of the day. We call ourselves supporters because that is the accepted terminology, but there are few of us who enact that term well. I was reading a piece from one of my favorite writers on Crónica Perica, Gonzalo de Martorell, and he was riffing on the same subject: about cowardice. He calls us cowards because at the end of the day, even if we cheer for our club at Cornellà or defend our colors throughout the day, that we fail in the end to hold the club, its leadership in this case, to the same standards we hold ourselves to. We watch as players, as he puts it ¨leave through the back-door, with an injurious official response of indifference, players who bled for the shirt¨, and we hear the rumors of suspicious dealings, profits to be had in the sale of players like Pablo Osvaldo, but we do nothing. We don´t protest when we read every few months that ¨the debt is always a little bit more than we expected”and we don´t march when our players are sold to foreign investment funds. We are afraid that our criticism will be thrown against us, of our supposed ignorance, and of our lack of support.
It´s the age old question. How best to support your club? Wear the scarf and the new Li-Ning kit, buy our products at our shiny new UEFA-class stadium, cheer the squad on as best you can, but don´t dare criticize or you´re a ¨bad perico¨ as de Martorell puts it, when that is the perfect time to enforce your opinion. We are not supporters. We are not consumers. We are investors. Our families, some newly committed like mine and others spanning generations, have devoted themselves to Espanyol because it fits with who we are as a community. Our opinions matter. Respect is an issue, but until we stand our ground they will continue to sell our community´s assets, the players, the kit, the shirt or even the stadium, for their own gain. Until then we´re no more than fans: fanatics, zealots with an extreme affinity for the crest, uncritical in their passion and easily misled.
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