Censoring The Nat’l Anthem Will Get You Canned

The long story short: Athletic Bilbao [shameless advertisement: AB needs a blogger] and Barcelona are from Basque Country and Catalonia, respectively. Both would like independence, Spain would like to hold them close to its bosom for as long as possible. So when King Juan Carlos showed up as the national anthem was bellowing out of the speakers for the Copa del Rey final on Wednesday, things went predictably downhill as the merger of politics and football rarely scoffs at the chance for drama. Jeering commenced and largely drowned out the anthem.

With one of the mediums from Vanilla Sky Minority Report (I got my mediocre Tom Cruise movies mixed up) at their employ, the production team at TVE sensed this on the horizon, thus deciding free speech is for losers and instead showed footage of the Athletic fans in Bilbao and the Barca fans in Barcelona rather than the dicey stadium feed. Not the smartest of ideas during the Spanish Cup final.

But making matters worse they eventually aired the anthem…just doctored. They beefed up the anthem sound and cut out a great deal of the crowd’s jeering and whistles so as to toe the party line. You can see the footage of Bilbao and Barcelona in the beginning of the video, the radio feed with the actual stadium sound and then the PC version at the end of the above YouTuber.

And, quite predictably, TVE sports director Julian Reyes has found himself unemployed for this little snafu. Eventually – once TVE copped to the little error and took responsibility. Proving once more that mixing football and politics will produce a product akin to a love tryst between Cristiano Ronaldo and Paul Mitchell: they might have the best intentions but a fiery explosion will occur and someone is going to end up in tears, without their dignity – possibly their job – and with a gooey residue left over no one wants to clean up.

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Category: Spain La Liga