"By your team(s) shall ye be judged"

In case it had escaped your attention, the European Cup football competition has just commenced. Love it or loathe it, football plays a significant role in contemporary social life and it could be argued that one of the ways in which the stature of a city can be measured is by how many top-ranking football teams it can boast of. Take London for example. Donostia has one major football team, La Real Sociedad, which is currently fighting to regain premier league status. Why is this important? Because in many ways the psychological well-being of a city is integrally bound up with the fortunes of its football team. When the team loses and its followers suffer, so does the city, to a greater or lesser extent.

La Real have seen days of glory in the past but the last few years have been characterized mostly by disappointing results and a downward spiral towards relegation. The situation now is that the team is teetering on the edge of a joyous return to the Premier League or seeing themselves obliged to spend another year of uncertainty in the Second Division. Such situations provoke anxiety. To complicate matters further, this weekend La Real are playing Alavés, a team from another regional Basque capital, Vitoria/Gasteiz, and which has suffered even greater sporting indignity in the last year. If Alavés lose tomorrow, they run the risk of being demoted to the Third Division… Football is not my passion but I can't help but feel nervous about tomorrow's result.

The sharp-eyed reader will have noticed that the title for this posting refers to 'team(s)' - the fact is that the psychological well-being of sports fans from Donostia and Vitoria/Gasteiz has not only been conditioned by their respective football teams in the last week. Both cities have had cause for celebration too, this time in the context of basketball, which must be Spain's second favourite sport after football. Tau Cerámica-Baskonia from Vitoria/Gasteiz won the ACB (Premier) League title for the second time and Bruesa GBC from Donostia won promotion to the same premier league. TV news pictures showed team members attending public celebrations and 'thanksgiving' ceremonies in their respective home cities… Clearly, sport is a topic to be taken seriously in that it lies close to the hearts of many people. I only fear that some of those hearts are all too likely to be broken by this time next week. Let's hope I'm wrong!