Lack of fields, decaying facilities and broken promises
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BarcelonaIt is dark in the Foixarda field. It’s seven o’clock in the evening and all the floodlights that illuminate the grass of the rugby field are on. It’s rush hour: the field is full. Too much, though. More than 180 players of all ages – from the youngest who can’t lift a ball of dirt to the senior who competes in the Honor B Division – are forced to share the field of play to train on a grass where only to have a maximum of 30 players. Seven categories and nine Gothic teams share a field that cannot accommodate them all. The situation is critical. “There are men over twenty years old training next to children of six or seven. Someone can get hurt,” explains the president of the club, José Luis Blanco. But there is no other option: Barcelona only has four rugby pitches for the city’s nine teams, and training hours are limited – “children can only train from the time they leave school until dinner time.” According to Blanco, the situation is “unsustainable” and he considers it a “shame”.
“We feel forgotten and deceived”, says the president of the Catalan Rugby Federation, Ignasi Planas. The entity says that it can no longer bear the current “abandonment” situation and denounces that the Barcelona City Council “has systematically broken its promises to build new facilities in the city”. The space problem is big and the organization is fed up with it. “In relations with the administration, I am of the opinion that either they must love you or they must fear you. I, because of the way I am, always have a constructive attitude. Now, when you have only 12 years good words, you have the feeling that your hair has been taken. Barcelona City Council has taken the world of rugby by the hair. They promised us a field 12 years ago and we still don’t have it,” says Planas, who remembers that no field has been built since the 1992 Olympics.
Rugby is drowning
After a study that compares Madrid with Barcelona, the situation in the Ciutat Comtal is even more alarming. “In Catalonia we have a record number of licenses despite the fact that the capital is in a freezing situation. They don’t let us grow any more, we are stagnant. We cannot allow ourselves to be condemned to vegetate, to stay out of a dynamic of growth that is being given to the rest of the territory. Compared to the Spanish state, it is scandalous. In Madrid, with 4,000 licenses, they have 13 fields, four of which were inaugurated this term. Don’t tell me that Madrid has the capacity to four fields in four years and Barcelona cannot build one in 30 years. The function of politicians is not to give excuses, it is to give solutions. If the Barcelona City Council cannot find a plot of land to build a rugby field, then it is of no use for the work he has to do. There is a question of political will and we have to say enough,” adds the president of the Federation.
From the clubs they can’t do more. Not only did they not get the field they asked for, but they lost two in the last few years. “Of the four fields that are there, that two have the sword of Damocles on them when we already have two fields less is a disaster,” says Toni Roig, CEO of CEU Rugby. “We had some locker rooms that had scaffolding installed for five or six years, but a technician decided it wasn’t dangerous. One day a kid leaned on a strut that held up the ceiling and the strut fell. We had to close the dressing room. The City Council told us that they would help us fix it, but nothing has been done yet,” he says. “Things must be done well. The facilities must be decent. Right now those in Barcelona give the worst image of Spanish rugby,” adds Paco Peña, CEO of Barça’s rugby section.
David Escudé, Councilor for Sports at the Barcelona City Council, admits to the ARA that they are aware that rugby in Barcelona needs a new field and shares and understands the claim of the clubs and the Federation. “It’s complicated, though,” he says. “It is not true that we have left them aside. We have been talking on several occasions and I am surprised that they say this”, he confesses.
Until a solution is found, however, life and rugby go on. Day-to-day life in La Foixarda is frenetic. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the Barcelona University Club (BUC) trains there, on Tuesday and Thursday it is the turn of the Gothics. The team has the facilities full to overflowing, and this is a problem financially. For each team that uses the field, the club pays the full rent of the turf. The problem is that, despite paying the rent for the entire field, they can only use a sixth of it due to the need to share it. And to do so, moreover, in a decadent facility. On the other hand, the senior team, which cannot train until the field is cleared, does a pre-training session in the open air with equipment that the club has bought and keeps in a container.
At eight o’clock in the evening, finally, the lawn begins to be emptied. The little ones look for their parents, and the big ones start training in earnest with distances more similar to those they will have in matches. Like the Gothics, the nine clubs in the city work hard to keep alive a sport full of values and which in Catalonia is more than historical.
