Basket Case: Sport and tourism promotion

Wherever a successful sportsman or woman or successful sports team is to be found, someone from a Spanish tourism promotion authority will also be found, running behind, puffing and turning puce and brandishing an advertising contract.

If not the Mallorcans Nadal and Lorenzo, then it will be either the Real Madrid football team or the Spanish men's basketball side. Both Madrid and the basketball players are faces and bodies of tourism promotion.

The contracts are, however, different. Madrid are being paid a million euros. The basketball team is getting nothing. Nada. Not a centimo. European champions, they are worth zilch. How come Madrid can be paid and the basketball team can't be?

It seems to have to do with the fact that Madrid is a business and that the basketball team is a representative of the state, down to its red and yellow strip. The six players from the championship-winning side depicted in Turespaña's hastily cobbled-together advert are "ambassadors" for Spain. Does this mean, therefore, that the Madrid players aren't? No, as they too, according to Turespaña, are ambassadors. If you play in white, though, you get paid; just ask Nadal.

Whatever the ins and outs of the contractual agreement, why is the Spanish tourism promotion agency, Turespaña, so desperate to nail its promotional colours to the masts of successful sports teams? The answer seems pretty simple. Teams with high recognition as well as fame mean high awareness and, you would hope, high numbers of tourists. In Madrid's case this may be so, but as for the basketball team, the thinking is more questionable. Perhaps this explains why they're not getting paid.

The ad featuring the basketball players is all part of the Turespaña campaign under the slogan of "I Need Spain". Yes, that campaign, the one that demands you fill in the missing words. I need Spain like I need a massive budget deficit; this sort of thing. Apparently, the basketball guys not only themselves need Spain, they love it. The ad carries the legend: "There is only one thing they love more than basketball - Spain". We'll take their word for it.

Questionable as this ad is in terms of what it might actually achieve for tourism, there is a question mark over whether a national basketball team should be going anywhere near Spanish tourism promotion. The reason for this is that basketball and Spain have form.

There was the unfortunate matter of the Spanish team which won the Paralympics gold medal in Sydney in 2000, but which turned out to have contained some ringers, i.e. players (ten out of the twelve) who were fully mentally able. Then there was the slitty-eyed gesture advert the men and women's teams participated in during the Beijing Olympics, which might not have caused much of a fuss had Sid Lowe of "The Guardian" not brought it to the world's attention. Let's just say that Spanish basketball, in its 2011 incarnation, is more ambassadorial.

But what of Real Madrid? In June, a promotional video popped up with nine players. All good ambassadors for Spain? Only up to a point, as only two of them were Spanish. Otherwise it was a video that would have played well with the German tourism market (Özil and Khedira), the French (Benzema) and the all-important Brazilian (Kaká and Marcelo), Argentinian (Di María) and Portuguese (Ronaldo) markets.

There is a rather obvious question. Why Madrid and not Barcelona? Barça are after all European club champions. At the time of the announcement of the tie-up with Madrid, the minister for industry, tourism and commerce, Miguel Sebastián, said that it had not been possible to come to an agreement with the club that would have allowed the use of the team's image and that things were rather easier where Madrid was concerned. Barcelona, however, said that there had been no request from the government.

Things being easier with Madrid than Barcelona presumably had nothing to do with Barça being littered with Catalan players and also nothing to do with the fact that the club had an existing agreement with the Catalonia Tourism Agency. The club has said that it is open to an approach from Turespaña so long as it doesn't conflict with its arrangements with the agency, which it probably almost certainly would.

And so the age-old Madrid versus Barcelona, Spain versus Catalonia El Clásico national division persists and with it so tourism promotion becomes political. The basketball players love Spain and together with Real Madrid, the team with all its historical connotations of Spanishness, they form the faces of Spain. I need Spain. I need Spain like I need the eternal row between Castile and Catalonia.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.