Think of the most venomous atmosphere in sport, magnify it by a thousand, stir in a palpable sense of betrayal and add a soundtrack of screeching jeers and you still do not come close to the anger of a raw, rancorous Nou Camp in October 2000. It seemed days before my ears stopped ringing.
This was not the pantomime booing you often hear at games. Even in the warm-up, more than 100,000 Catalans turned all their deeply wounded pride on Luís Figo any time he dared to touch the ball on his first return to Barcelona since he did the unthinkable and departed for Real Madrid.
“You would sell your mother — if you knew who she was,” was one of hundreds of banners to greet the “Traitor”, the “Judas”, the “Son of a Whore”. Thousands of fake 10,000 peseta notes bearing Figo’s face rained down from the terraces.
The entire front page of one Catalan newspaper on the morning of the game carried a giant picture of Figo’s ear with an invitation — readily accepted — to hurl abuse. Bricks were thrown at the Real coach on its way from the airport.
I remember talking to Steve McManaman about how he and the rest of Figo’s team-mates saw the fury when they landed in Barcelona and took their seats on the bus a safe distance away from the most hated figure in Catalonia.
An enthralling new Netflix documentary, The Figo Affair, reminds us just why this was one of the most controversial and seismic transfers of all time.
A world-record fee of £38 million for one of the very best footballers on the planet moving between such bitter rivals could only ever be contentious, but the intrigue is in following all the clandestine forces that made such an unlikely deal happen.
We see the machinations of agents, the manipulations of directors and a slightly bewildered player at the eye of the storm wondering who is in charge of his career while claiming, not altogether convincingly, that this was all about respect and not money.
This being 21st-century football, money is absolutely at the heart of the story, but also gigantic ego too. The transfer’s genesis depended on the overweening ambition of Florentino Pérez, the super-rich owner of a construction company, to become president of Real in 2000.
Pérez knew he had to conjure something special to oust Lorenzo Sanz, who had just steered the club to two Champions League trophies in three years after a wait of more than three decades. His pitch was the galacticos project, attracting the world’s superstars. Figo was his first target, starting a tug-of-war that lurched one way and the other amid rumour, claim and counterclaim in the summer of 2000.
Barcelona fans had taken Figo to their hearts in the five years since Johan Cruyff had brought him to the Nou Camp. He had become one of the sport’s stellar talents — two-footed, strong, fast, beautifully balanced and able to play as an orthodox winger or cut inside and shoot from distance.
Figo had become an honorary Catalan, leading the club to two Spanish titles, dying his hair in the club’s colours and singing derogatory songs about Real’s “cry-babies” to an adoring public. He had a best mate in the dressing room in Pep Guardiola, who recalls the whole affair with aching sadness.
But for all that the documentary can call on celebrated names — Guardiola, Roberto Carlos, Figo himself — the show really belongs to José Veiga, Figo’s agent at the time, and the wonderfully roguish Paulo Futre, the former Portuguese international and middle-man who decided that this transfer must happen, and had millions of reasons to make sure it did.
The programme becomes a dark comedy as Futre and Veiga take desperate measures to persuade Figo to move, chasing him on to a beach in their suits as they fear that a €30m penalty clause signed with Pérez could become their very expensive problem.
Figo vacillates, telling one newspaper that he is moving and another that he is staying. His agent begs him to move; his wife tells him to stay. Eventually he arrives at the Bernabéu looking less like a superstar footballer, more a hostage.
Of course, as Figo reflects, it worked out pretty well in the stuff that you can measure — wealth and trophies. He collected the Ballon d’Or at the end of 2000 and a league title in his first season with Real. The other galacticos followed — Zinédine Zidane, Ronaldo, David Beckham — and the Champions League too.
But no one comes out of this documentary particularly well, which makes it all the more compelling. The game is not revealed to be beautiful but grubby, archly political and duplicitous, with feuding and, of course, bitter recriminations.
That night in the Nou Camp, Figo was cowed by the hostility, staying in the middle of the pitch, not daring to take corners because of a bombardment of bottles, lighters and fruit. A couple of years later, in November 2002, a pig’s head was among the missiles.
“And pigs might fly” might have been an alternative title to this extraordinary tale.
● The Figo Affair is available on Netflix
