Sant Andreu - Barcelona's cult club where 'each defeat gets you more hooked' (2024)

In the Sant Andreu de Palomar neighbourhood of Barcelona, bars begin to fill up with fans from 11am on matchdays — but you won’t see a single Barca shirt.

They’re not supporters of Espanyol, the city’s other big team, either. The kits they wear carry yellow and red stripes, mirroring the flag of Catalonia. These are the colours of UE Sant Andreu.

In a city where Barca dominates, and Espanyol follows, it is strange to find fans who identify with any other side. It is even more unusual for that team to be a lowly fourth-tier outfit playing semi-professional, regionalised football. But visitors to Barcelona might be surprised by the number of their supporters you spot on the street.

Over the past year, Sant Andreu almost tripled the number of its official club members. In October 2022, they closed the window for selling season tickets, with 1,134 having taken up the offer. By the same date in 2023, there were 3,110.

They may still be modest by comparison, Sant Andreu’s following is growing in number in the shadow of their more illustrious neighbours. And there are several reasons why.

Sant Andreu is located in the north east of Barcelona, but walking through its streets you wouldn’t think you were in the city. The streets are narrow and dominated by pedestrians — it’s rare to see a vehicle pass by, and hard to find a place to park.

Its buildings and houses are generally low-rise, with a maximum of two floors — again something unusual in Barcelona — and many share the same distinctive terracotta colour. Several avenues are lined with orange trees and it is common to see fruit falling when the wind blows a little in season.

Its football club was founded in 1909, 13 years after the area became part of the city of Barcelona. If you ask locals, even today they will say they are not from Barcelona but from the village of Sant Andreu instead — and the football team’s origins share that same sense of local pride, of resistance to the idea of being subsumed by the big city.

Strong community links still exist today. Sant Andreu are known for their left-wing politics and support for various progressive social causes.

When a Copa del Rey draw in 2018 paired them with Atletico Madrid and they had to play at the Wanda Metropolitano, they used the most important day in their history to display the logo of ‘Open Arms’, an NGO dedicated to saving the lives of immigrants seeking to reach Europe by sea. They continue to wear the logo and actively collaborate with them.

Sant Andreu were the first Spanish football club to denounce the behaviour of Luis Rubiales at the final of the Women’s World Cup back in August, where the former Spanish Football Federation kissed Jenni Hermoso during the medal ceremony, and grabbed his testicl*s in celebration in the stands.

The club’s ideals have helped them find popularity among the many in Catalan society who share the same values, and those who want to feel part of a football club that is keen to speak and act on big issues off the pitch.

That is something reminiscent of Barca’s famous ‘mes que un club’ (more than a club) motto. But in recent years Barca have been gradually losing the power of that association (perhaps one day it will be lost altogether, suddenly — like Ernest Hemingway said). Some members have instead moved towards Sant Andreu — and the modest club’s own reach is only growing.

In November, the beer brand Estrella Damm became a club sponsor. Back in July, Meyba — the Catalan company that supplied Barcelona’s kit in the 1980s and early 1990s, including during part of the ‘Dream Team’ era under Johan Cruyff — chose Sant Andreu as their first relaunch project in the sector, having gone out of business in 1997. A first run of 1,000 shirts was made, which sold out in a few days despite the not-quite-so-modest price tag of €59.

“It’s impossible to get them; no shop has them, not even the club,” a salesman from a local sportswear shop tells The Athletic. “When they go on sale they disappear quickly.”

Sant Andreu’s shirt is distinctive for matching the Catalan flag. Readers might recall some of Barca’s second or third kits since 2013 have also featured yellow and red stripes — but Sant Andreu got theirs first.

“We’ve been wearing this shirt for more than 100 years and it hurts us that many foreigners say it’s Barca’s shirt,” club president Manuel Camino said in 2013. “It’s Barca who wear our colours. They took the shirt in an opportunistic way.”

Sant Andreu have indeed always worn the same colours since their foundation, except during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, when they were forced to change, wearing a white shirt, and a yellow one with blue stripes. It coincided with the team’s most successful spell — they were in Spain’s second tier from 1969-1977.

More serious problems for the club are related to previous poor financial management. Camino is the current president, but before him came former Barcelona president Joan Gaspart (between 2004 and 2011) and Dani Alves’ ex-wife Dinora Santana, who served for a year in 2014. The club have been facing debts that are dragging on from that time and still hurting them today.

“We were fined by the treasury and social security and we still have to make monthly payments,” says Francesc Vives, a team delegate who has been with the club for 22 years. “That makes us a little financially suffocated. Fortunately, Camino is back and we are recovering.”

Sant Andreu had debts of €700,000 (£606,500; $772,200) which they have since brought down to €500,000, but they are still paying those fines off too — at a cost of €8,500 a month.

David Mordillo, the club’s general manager, says it has taken “seven years to recover” after a relegation to Spain’s fifth tier in 2015 that “hurt in every way: sportingly, economically and socially”.

Since 2015, the team have begun to show their best again, including in the 2018 Copa del Rey against Atletico — who beat them 5-0 on aggregate in the round of 32.

Gerard Alvarez, the club’s head of communications and marketing, puts it like this: “The things we have experienced here are probably more marked by defeats than by victories. Like Catalonia.

“But with each defeat you get more and more hooked.”

The day after Sant Andreu won promotion to Spain’s fourth tier in June, through victory in the away leg of a promotion play-off against Salamanca, the team returned home to celebrate.

They went to the Placa d’Orfila, the nerve centre of the neighbourhood where the town hall and the Church of Sant Andreu del Palomar — one of the buildings that defines the local skyline — are located.

There, to the surprise even of the players themselves, a huge crowd gathered, all dressed in the team’s kit.

“We passed through the middle of the square, surrounded by people waving to us,” recalls Josu Rodriguez, one of the team’s longest-serving players.

“We went up to the balcony of the town hall, leaned on the railing and suddenly we saw the square packed with about 3,000 people. I had only seen that on TV, of teams from the first or second division when they did parades with big buses. On our procession, we walked through the streets of Sant Andreu.”

Sant Andreu’s stadium is considerably larger than others in its category, with a 6,563 capacity. Attendances have not dropped below 2,000 since April, but regularly reach 3,000 and 4,000. On the biggest day of the season — the derby meeting with CE Europa, another historic Barcelona club The Athletic will write more about in the future — the stands are overflowing.

“Having a fanbase like ours has helped us a lot and we try to go hand-in-hand with them,” Alvarez says. “We have put democratic prices on tickets and season tickets, and we look after them with travel.”

Rodriguez adds: “One day I came home after a game and my wife asked me — very surprised — how could it be that kids were asking for photos of me in a city where Lionel Messi, Gerard Pique and other stars were playing.

“That’s what the club is doing well. Now children want to be UE Sant Andreu fans.”

(Top photo: Sant Andreu)

Before joining The Athletic as a football writer, Laia Cervelló worked at Diario Sport reporting on FC Barcelona for four years. She has also worked for another four years for BeIN SPORTS Spain and GOLTV. She began her career as a journalist at 'betevé', the public television station in Barcelona, where she spent almost nine years.