In the new edition of his book Morbo, Phil Ball meets the ever-polite people of Vigo and La Coruña, the north-western cities that have unexpectedly become Spain’s new football powerhouses, challenging Madrid and Barcelona from a weather-beaten land
In August 2002, most of Spain was covered by a wet blanket of stubborn grey cloud instead of enjoying the usual weeks of sunshine. Curiously, Galicia, the north-western region of Spain that normally suffers from an average of 320 days of rain a year, was enjoying its best summer for 50 years, baking under cloudless skies while the rest of the country shivered in the rain. Approaching a young couple on the beach at La Coruña, a reporter for Spain’s national television channel, TVE1, held out a microphone to the bikini-clad girl and asked her how she felt for the rest of Spain. With an indignant flick of her sun-bleached blonde hair, she tersely replied: “Que se jodan.” (“Fuck ’em.”) The rest of Spain was outraged, yet at the same time amused by the confirmation that the Galicians thought of Spain as a land-mass hardly worth considering.