Kick into touch

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This summer, FC Barcelona received €222 million for the transfer of Neymar Jr. and quickly reinvested €145m in Ousmane Dembélé, a 19-year-old player who came to fill the space left by the Brazilian. While these gigantic operations were taking place, however, another set of players were ready to kick off their pre-season with significantly less media attention. 

FC Barcelona’s motto més que un club (more than a club) is evident through the many sports it embraces under one crest. Rugby is one of them, and this year Barça’s rugby squad is competing at the highest level of Spanish rugby union—in the División de Honor—for the fourth consecutive season.

The sport arrived in the region in the early-20th century, and is thought to have been originally introduced by French and British workers, although it didn’t become popular until some years later. Baldiri Aleu i Torres, a Catalan studying in Toulouse, is credited with bringing the sport to Barcelona when he returned home from university and founded the Unió Esportiva Santboiana—the oldest team in Spain—based in Sant Boi de Llobregat. Consequently, rugby terms in Spain are expressed in French; lineout is ‘touche’, scrum is ‘melée’ and forward pass is ‘avant’.

Rugby in Barcelona has gained momentum and fans over the last 20 years. Although few people involved in this ‘thug’s game played by gentlemen’ make any money—the sport is primarily amateur in Spain, with only a handful of semi-professional clubs and players—local clubs are slowly developing infrastructure. The city’s seven teams share four rugby fields, and entrance for spectators is generally free. In 2016, the French Rugby League—one of the most influential in the world—chose Camp Nou to host its final, traditionally held at the Stade de France in Paris (which was unavailable due to the UEFA Euro 2016 football championship). 

Paco Peña is responsible for rugby at FC Barcelona. He described the role it has within the club and how the club’s brand is encouraging the growth of the sport. “FC Barcelona Rugby is an amateur section, but the club understands the potential it has, and gives its full support to keep growing,” explained Peña. In the last few years, he has seen the academy grow from little more than 20 young players to nearly 300. “Having the support of FC Barcelona gives us the confidence to keep expanding. I believe that having the club behind us helps not only us, but local rugby as a whole.”

Barça’s first victory of the season came in their second match, at home to CR La Vila—a Valencian club based in La Vila Joiosa. The same coastal journey is regularly taken by other Catalan teams competing in the Spanish second division, the División de Honor B, which is divided into three groups by region: north (A), east (B) and centre/south (C). Group B includes six Catalan teams, five Valencians and one Aragonese, so it is a well-trodden path.

Below the Spanish second division, lower leagues are organised within each region, rather than nationwide. Catalunya has three divisions in which Barcelona-based teams play against neighbouring towns, such as L’Hospitalet, Sant Cugat or Santboiana. But no matter how far teams have to travel to play a match practically all the players involved in Spanish rugby, from the very bottom of the last division up to Barça’s rugby squad, share the same motivation to face 15 rivals on the pitch every weekend: they do it out of love for the sport.

Despite this, those in charge of rugby in Barcelona believe there is a need to professionalise the sport. Jordi Homs is the president of Rugby Barcelona, an association that includes all seven teams from the city and works to raise the sport’s profile. They are currently looking for the financial support needed to move forward.

“There’s not a lot of support from the institutions. In Barcelona, the city council has recently pledged more than €3.2 million to athletics over four years. Rugby doesn’t even get one percent of that,” claimed Homs. “Rugby is a centenary sport in Catalunya and it has missed many opportunities to modernise and develop. We are working hard to get it known and appreciated, albeit with little economic support.”

Both Homs and Peña agree that there is a big jump, both economically and competitively, between divisions in Spain, and even more so when compared with other countries. Sometimes clubs have to make a real effort to pay the expenses required to play at the highest level. Travel costs are higher when playing in the División de Honor and the División de Honor B, and a lack of infrastructure in individual clubs makes it difficult to improve the ability level. In an attempt to overcome these issues, CN Poblenou became the first foreign team to be admitted into an English league from 2006 to 2009, when they joined the Greene King Super Premier League in Hertfordshire; they did it to cut costs. Flying to England every other weekend was cheaper than playing on home soil, thanks to the explosion of low cost flights. Furthermore, the experience of playing against an English side was beneficial, as the level of competition was generally higher. 

In spite of all the challenges rugby faces in Barcelona, the sport is on the up, and women have played an important role in rugby’s recent surge in popularity. All seven teams in the city have a female squad, with INEF Rugby playing at the highest level in the women’s División de Honor (also known as the Liga Guerreras Iberdrola). The success of women in the sport is most evident at an international level—the women’s Spanish rugby union team, known as Las Leonas, are still behind countries such as England or New Zealand, but have appeared five times in the Rugby World Cup since 1991 and are currently ranked 10th in the world. 

The men’s national squad, on the other hand, is ranked 19th and have only appeared once in the Rugby World Cup, in 1999, although this did mark a turning point in terms of the sport’s popularity. Since then, the number of male players in Spain has almost doubled, rising from approximately 15,000 in 2000 to 27,361 in 2016. One inch at a time, those involved in the world of rugby in Barcelona are pushing forward, dreaming of the day when one of the city’s teams will play a match at Camp Nou.