“It is much more than a game. It is a cry for solidarity and a tribute to the more than 400 Palestinian athletes murdered in Gaza. Let’s fill the stadium.”
That was the call made by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola to his fellow Catalans, published last week in a video by Act x Palestine, the organisation promoting Tuesday night’s friendly fixture at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium between the national teams of Catalonia and Palestine.
By the weekend 23,000 tickets had been sold, though for the visiting Palestine team, it will take something very special to surpass their experience on Saturday night when in front of 51,396 spectators at Athletic Bilbao’s San Mames stadium, they played their first-ever match in Europe against the Basque Country national team.
For Palestine head coach Ihab Abu Jazar, the first fixture of their Spanish tour was not just “historic” but “the most important day of my life”.
“We felt like we were at home,” he added after experiencing the deep solidarity showed by the Basque public – no small thing for a team whose last true home fixture was a World Cup qualifier against Saudi Arabia in October 2019 just before the Covid pandemic.
With the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and increased restrictions on movement in the West Bank, Palestine – who gained Fifa recognition in 1998 – had to play the “home” matches for their latest World Cup qualifying campaign in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Malaysia.
“When I talk about my national team, I talk about the national team of refugees,” reflected Abu Jazar after Saturday’s match, noting that some of his players are fourth-generation exiles and have yet to step foot on Palestinian soil.
“I can talk about players representing Palestine who are from Palestine, from Europe, from North America, South America, Asia.” Among them is Yaser Hamed, who was born in the Basque Country.
In truth, Palestine’s national team have long faced obstacles. In June 2004, for example, Israeli restrictions meant no player from Gaza could leave the territory to join the squad for a key World Cup qualifier against Uzbekistan. Two years later, Palestine forfeited a fixture against Singapore after a cohort of players from Gaza were again barred from travelling.
Today, like everything else in Gaza, the football infrastructure has been shattered. More than 400 members of the football community have been killed. Meanwhile, the West Bank Premier League’s suspension in 2023 has left players lacking match fitness, causing further issues for the national team. As one Palestinian FA official explained to The i Paper while waiting for Sunday’s flight to Barcelona, in June their headquarters in Al-Ram were struck by Israeli army tear-gas canisters.
Hence the strong emotion of Saturday’s fixture. Abu Jazar, whose father was killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza and whose home in Rafah has been bombed, said it was “the first time I’ve cried at the Palestinian anthem”.
He added: “I don’t have words to express what I felt. In the first moment out there, the first thing that came to mind was the suffering of my family, and all the population in Gaza and Palestine – generally all the martyrs of Palestinian sport, not just football [and] all the suffering up to now of our people in Palestine. Today I saw almost 52,000 people supporting Palestine.”
“Long live the Palestinian resistance” read a banner displayed behind one goal. Chants in Basque of “Free Palestine” were heard throughout a match in which the 3-0 win for the home side felt incidental.
As a hint of what Tuesday’s game in Barcelona might bring, scenes of the destruction in Gaza, provided by Medecins sans Frontieres – the beneficiary of the ticket sales – played on the giant screens beforehand.
There was a haunting piece of music from the Sol Band, a music group from Gaza. And while the Basque players each came out accompanied by a mascot, the Palestine players each held a white rose, symbols of the children killed in Gaza. The teams lined up behind a board bearing the message “Peace”. The visiting players showed a banner saying, “Stop genocide”.
Another noteworthy detail before the game was the sound of air-raid sirens. The official presentation of Saturday’s friendly had been held at the Museum of Peace in Gernika, a Basque town flattened by German bombers in 1937.
That was one reason for this show of solidarity according to Xabier Fernandez from Gernika Palestina, the group which organised one of the two marches to San Mames in which at least 20,000 people took part.
“We have sympathy for those people who fight for their identity and their future freedom,” Fernandez said, pointing also to a push for official recognition of the Basque team (and similar sentiments will apply in Catalonia).
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A Basque Country XI toured abroad during the Spanish Civil War but in in Bilbao and Barcelona this week, it is a different team in exile doing just that.
As Abu Jazar told The i Paper late on Saturday night, though, they still hold on to the dream of playing at home once more.
“We’re going to play again in Palestine, in our home,” he vowed, adding: “We’re going to invite national teams from around the world to come and play in Palestine. The day we’re dreaming of, which is near, to having our land, our airport [and] go out from there and compete with other national teams and then come back home where we’ll still be playing.”
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