Growing up in 1990s Barcelona in a family that did not much care for football, the game first reached my attention via an unusual path. It wasn’t watching Michael Laudrup’s no-look passes that first impressed me, it was how it all affected my grandfather.
I used to spend some weekends at his house. When Barcelona were playing, you could tell that something big was going on. Throughout the day, his nervousness would increase, until an hour before the match he would lock himself in a room, alone with an old radio in hand.
As the end of the game approached, my grandmother would warn me and my brother: “When he comes out, don’t say anything to him. Not a single word.”
We sensed the match was finished when his door would open onto the living room where we were probably watching Forrest Gump or Men in Black. If he looked bad, Barcelona might have won. If he looked really bad, Barca had drawn or lost. And it really was better to leave him be for a while.
The six-year-old me was amazed by three things. First was the capacity football had to change his mood. To me, in my child’s mind, it was just a game, something to enjoy. Second was the pessimism he had about his club. Third was that he chose to listen to the matches instead of watching on TV.
Laudrup playing for Barcelona in the 1992 European Cup final (VI Images via Getty Images)
I asked myself if it was because my brother and I were watching our films instead, but my grandmother told me it was not. “The radio accompanies him,” she said. That was my first contact with radio and football, and over the years and with age, I have come to understand their unique cultural combination in Spain, something that phrase sums up.
For my grandfather, radio was the voice that accompanied him while he went to sleep, while he showered, while he drove or did the dishes. It was a member of the family — and he was by no means the only one. Despite the rise of new media, radio has a huge role in many people’s lives in Spain. There is a deep-rooted fondness here that feels unique.
Take football, for example. Many people, even still these days, prefer to listen to games on the radio than watch on TV. So much so that Movistar, the TV company with the widest range of broadcast rights in Spain, gives audience members the chance to tune into radio commentary to accompany its pictures, from a wide selection of channels.
Catalunya Radio’s Marta Carreras at the (old) Camp Nou (Matthew Ashton/AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)
To the uninitiated, listening to a Spanish football radio broadcast might be a bit confusing at first. There are many, many voices — not just the match commentator and their companion as is usual in most places — and they can each come in over the top of one another at unexpected times. Then there’s the sometimes unusually timed interruptions from advertisers — whose messages are delivered by familiar voices of the broadcast team.
During Spain’s 4-1 last-16 victory over Georgia at Euro 2024, the Carrusel Deportivo show on Cadena SER featured the following passage, just after Rodri’s equaliser.
Commentator: “Another Spanish goal, we have to cheer up! Spain can still come back against Georgia!”
Disco music plays
Another voice on the commentary team: “You know that in order to score goals, we need the role of each player to be crucial. At Palacios tortillas, every ingredient has a role!”
It might seem like a parody, but such exchanges are part of the day-to-day reality in Spanish radio. Again, it’s a reflection of its cultural power. Carrusel Deportivo averages 1.65million listeners a day, according to a comprehensive recent industry report, and advertisers want their brands inserted into the biggest moments.
For almost 24 years, Joan Maria Pou has commentated on Barcelona matches for RAC1, the leading radio station in Catalonia with an average daily audience of 942,000 listeners.
The Cadena Ser commentary team at Getafe in September 2021 (David S. Bustamante/Soccrates/Getty Images)
“There is a passion for pure live broadcasting here,” he says. “It is a construction that was born many years ago with the Carrusel Deportivo programme — a programme that broadcasts various sporting competitions that were taking place at the time — and that built a culture that didn’t exist. The format made a fortune and then spread to all the other radio stations.”
Barcelona currently has nine radio booths at the club’s temporary home, the Estadi Lluis Companys. In the old Camp Nou, there were 20. The club put the number of accredited radio journalists at 40 for each match. At the European Championship, accredited radio journalists outnumber those working for Spanish TV’s media rights holders.
A very popular format in all these programmes is the radio talk show with several journalists exchanging views and opinions. They are among the most influential in shaping the atmosphere around the country’s biggest teams (Real Madrid and Barcelona) and beyond.
When we talk about the famous ‘Barca entorno’, it is formed in large part by what is said in the daily radio programmes. At Barca, the first questions in media conferences always go to the radio stations, often because they are broadcasting live.
At RAC1, match broadcasts are made up of a main commentator, a co-commentator who provides analysis, two more observers with responsibility for picking up on off-field or harder-to-spot incidents, a narrative host, a figure responsible for delivering adverts, another in charge of sports news, another in charge of statistics and a final person overseeing social media output.
At any time of the day in Spain, you can listen to sports programmes on the radio. But the most listened-to programmes take place at a time most around the world would describe as late at night. Many of them start after 11pm and finish after 1am.
“The night time slot provides company and people listen because of the passion for sports journalism and sports opinion,” Pou says. “But above all, it happens because we are in a society that culturally goes to bed very late. The audience buys a schedule that wouldn’t make any sense in the rest of Europe.”
So despite some in other countries perhaps considering it an outdated medium, radio is not only surviving but flourishing in Spain.
And it will be right there again, front and centre, in the latest huge moment in the country’s rich and unique footballing landscape, in Sunday’s Euro 2024 final with England. We’ll be listening.
(Top photo: Stefan Matzke – sampics/Getty Images/Joe Prior/Visionhaus via Getty Images/iStock)
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