"A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere."
So said Groucho Marx on the topic of superstition. Sounds like fairly rational advice, yet one Argentine football club might beg to differ...
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Football & Black Magic
This may take the cake for the most superstitious act in world football.
Modern football is still full of instances of highly rational players doing highly irrational things to appease the football gods. Jermaine Defoe gets a haircut before every game to avoid injuries, Jamie Vardy necks a bottle of port, and Cristiano Ronaldo always steps onto the field right foot first before leaping into the air. But there must be a limit, a point where any reasonable thinking person draws the line; where rationality takes over, and says ‘no more!’; where pre-match preferences give way to the ridiculous.
If that limit exists, Racing Club de Avellaneda have been beyond.
The Buenos Aires club may take the cake for the most superstitious football club in the world. Take a step (right foot first, of course) back to 1966: English fans are celebrating a World Cup win, and are quietly confident they can do it again in four years time. On a domestic level, Racing Club de Avellaneda are in a golden era. They’ve just have won the Copa Libertadores, and would go on to beat Celtic the following year to win the Intercontinental Cup. It’s a hell of a time to be a Racing fan. Local rivals, Independiente were furious. So they did the only thing you can do when your rivals are winning trophies: They broke into Racing’s stadium and buried the corpses of seven black cats around the stadium to curse the club. Naturally…
But as strange as it sounds, it worked. Having topped the league six times in the previous 20 years, Racing would go on a title drought, for as long as they played on that feline graveyard. Maybe they just played bad football, or perhaps it was the natural ebbs and flows of life. Such rational notions were of little interest to Racing. Instead, they dug up their pitch to search for the corpses, and when they could only find six of the seven, even bought in an exorcist. To no avail.
Racing would go on a title drought, for as long as they played on that feline graveyard.
It would be 34 years before Racing would find that seventh cat. In 2001 as they excavated the stadium, the final corpse reared it’s decomposed head, and was finally removed from the grounds. Later that season, Racing won the league. Thirty four years... Maybe there is something in superstition after all. Someone needs to tell Groucho Marx.
And on an unrelated note, I’m off to Stamford Bridge with a shovel.
BY TIMOTHY CLARKE
