Tractor FC fans during a game against Esteghlal FC on 18 May 2023. Photo by Amir Ostovari, Farsnews.ir via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0.).

Antonio Salazar, Portugal’s fascist dictator who ruled from 1932 to 1968, famously governed the country with “three Fs”: fado (music), Fatima (religion), and football. These pillars formed the foundation of his totalitarian regime.

Football has often been dismissed by intellectuals as a form of low culture, a distraction from the serious business of politics and society. Yet there have always been exceptions — writers and thinkers who took the sport seriously, analyzing it as a cultural and sociological phenomenon. One such figure is the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who, alongside his literary works and translations, explored the world of football with rare insight.

In his book “Salvajes y sentimentales: Letras de fútbol” (“Wild and Sentimental: Writings on Football”), Marías weaves together personal reflection and literary style to discuss football as it plays out in Spain and across the world.

A lifelong supporter of Real Madrid, he sees La Liga, Spain's highest-level football league, as part of the weekly rhythm of his childhood. The forty-two essays in this collection are not mere journalistic pieces — they are confessions, memories, observations, and arguments, written with both emotional candor and intellectual sharpness.

Marías argues that football is one of the few experiences that can summon in adults the raw, instinctive emotions of childhood. To him, the sport is a weekly return to youth. He compares football to cinema — players, like actors, linger in the memory; coaches, like directors, shape teams with familiar casts. He likens Real Madrid to a Hitchcock film: suspenseful, nerve-wracking, but usually with a happy ending. “In European matches,” he writes in the book, “Madrid loves to concede three goals — just to come back and score more in the second leg.”

For Marías, football is more than spectacle; it is drama. A match without narrative, stakes, emotion, and consequence is hollow. “If winning or losing doesn’t affect the past, the future, your honor, or your face in the mirror the next morning,” he says, “then it’s not worth watching.”

He believes football is both the circus and the theater of our age — charged with excitement, fear, and unpredictability. A true fan must perceive each match as a decisive contest.

The sport also allows adults to express their most childlike reactions—fear, joy, anger, and even tears — without shame. For many, football is the only socially acceptable space to act with pure, unfiltered emotion.

One of football’s defining traits, Marías argues, is the unshakeable loyalty to one’s team. While people may change religions, spouses, political parties, homes, or tastes in art, their football club remains constant. As Spanish writer Vázquez Montalbán once said, “You don’t change the team you loved as a child.”

But just as vital as loyalty is rivalry. Marías writes, “If Barcelona were ever relegated to a small Catalan league and their historic clashes with Madrid came to an end, I would be deeply saddened.” Competition is part of football’s very DNA. Without it, the passion fades.

Marías believes that only someone deeply embedded in a culture can fully grasp the emotional weight of its football rivalries. Only an Italian truly understands Milan vs. Juventus; only a German gets Bayern vs. Mönchengladbach; only an Englishman feels the charge of Liverpool vs. Manchester United. And only a Spaniard carries the weight of hundreds of El Clásico memories on their retina.

Tractor: More than a football team

All of this reflection leads to a contemporary scene far from Madrid. Recently, amid the stress, suppression, and tension that define public life in Iran, a remarkable event unfolded: Tractor S.C., a team from the city of Tabriz in Iran's Azerbaijan region, became the national champion. In another context, this achievement might have been merely another football victory, but in Iran, it carries significant symbolic meanings.

Despite sustained efforts by state actors to reshape the team’s identity, co-opt its image, or inject nationalistic slogans into its narrative, Tractor has maintained its grassroots character. It has become not only a football team but also a symbol of cultural resistance — especially for Iran’s Turkic population.

Turks are the largest ethnic group in Iran, estimated at 40 percent of the population. They are present across all regions of Iran, and, for centuries, various Turkic dynasties ruled the country, laying the foundations of a shared cultural heritage.

Anti-Turkish and anti-Arab sentiments — or more broadly, xenophobia — remain among the social problems occasionally witnessed in Iran. The tendency to reduce the country’s political and social challenges to the alleged culpability of Turks or Arabs, along with the humiliation of these ethnic groups in certain football matches, reflects a more profound issue with unresolved tensions that become especially visible in stadiums.

Tractor's historical rivals — Tehran-based giants Esteghlal and Persepolis — represent the center politically, economically, and symbolically. In contrast, Tractor has come to embody the margins, the provinces, and the periphery. And now, for the first time in years, the balance of power seems to be shifting.

Tehran-based teams — ranging from Persepolis to Saipa, Pas, and Esteghlal — have collectively won the Iranian Premier League numerous times. Alongside them, provincial teams such as Malavan Bandar Anzali, Sepahan of Isfahan, and Foolad Khuzestan have also managed to win the league, becoming champions from outside the capital. The victory marks the first time, however, that Tractor from Azerbaijan has claimed the championship title.

Just as Marías suggests that Real Madrid gains meaning through its rivalry with Barcelona, Tractor’s very identity has been forged in opposition to central power. If that antagonism were to disappear, even fans might be uncertain whether to rejoice or mourn.

Tractor is more than a football team. It is a cultural and political phenomenon, playing two parallel matches — one on the field and one in the public arena, where ordinary people push back against state control over narrative and identity.

While the Iranian state, much like Salazar, continues to rely on its equivalent of the “three Fs” to manage society — religion, ritual, and controlled entertainment — Tractor defies this logic. Its power lies not just in its goals but in the emotions it unlocks: pride, defiance, and solidarity. The Iranian regime may attempt to control the game, but the stands and streets present a different story.

In a world where many feel trapped in systems of control, football might not save us — but it can open up the space to imagine justice. This space extends beyond the confines of the pitch, reaching all the way to Tabriz and beyond.