Xerez Deportivo pay homage to Lola Flores and Spain’s Romani Community
22 December 2024
By Paul ‘the Derry Maradona’ Reidy
This article comes from the anti-racist fanzine ‘A Sporting Chance’, created by the ERRC in 2024 to highlight the experiences of Roma, Sinti, & Travellers fighting racism through sport as part of the EU-funded Moving On project.
In 2022, the lower league Spanish club released a special tribute shirt celebrating the iconic flamenco singer and her gitana heritage.
It all started back in 1973 with German side Eintracht Braunschweig. With the team struggling at the wrong end of the Bundesliga table and the club contending with financial issues, the side from Lower Saxony accepted over 100,000 Deutschmarks from local liquor company Jägermeister to feature the brand name on the front of the club’s distinctive yellow jersey.
Back in the early 70’s, football shirts were uncomplicated, colourful affairs with the cotton jerseys at most, bearing the club badge and very occasionally the manufacturer’s logo. Braunschweig, however, were forced to circumnavigate initial objections from the DFB (German Football Association) who overruled the initiative stating that only the club crest could feature on the shirt which prompted the team to change their emblem, replacing it with the distinctive Jägermeister stag logo.
The move was something of a milestone for the football industry and paved the way for countless other clubs to use their front of shirt space as a billboard for brands looking to generate wider exposure with an increase in live televised matches.
Brazilian outfit Corinthians were one of the first high-profile clubs who decided to use their shirt to promote a message of a different type when they took to the field. Ahead of the national elections in November 1982, the São Paulo based side, inspired by politically active captain Socrates, took to the field with ‘Dia 15 Vote’ (Vote on the 15th) message on the back of their jerseys as a drive to encourage fans to cast their vote with the country under military dictatorship at the time. This initiative paved the way for the ‘Democracia Corinthiana’ movement where the players would vote on key internal matters affecting the club with their action becoming a source of inspiration for many dissenters in a country which was then governed by a military junta.
Over time, many other football clubs have realised that important political or socially aware messages can be conveyed to a mass audience with the likes of Sampdoria’s ‘Samp for Peace (1994), Bohemian FC’s ‘Refugees Welcome’ (2020) or St. Pauli’s ‘Kein Fussball den Fashiscten’ (No football for fascists) (2021) shirts all generating widespread interest for their unconventional use of space nowadays traditionally reserved for betting companies or airlines based in the Middle East.
Spanish football too has seen its fair share of clubs adopting the front of shirt space to convey pertinent social causes. From the iconic FC Barcelona ‘azulgrana’ stripes bearing the Unicef logo, marking the first time the Catalan club ever supported a shirt sponsor, through to both main Canary Island outfits (UD Las Palmas and CD Tenerife) making frequent use of special edition pink jerseys to highlight breast cancer awareness.
However, one of the recent high-profile collaborations to generate considerable hype involved the Andalusia based 2A RFEF side Xerez Deportivo FC, who play in the fourth tier of the Spanish football pyramid, as they paid homage to both iconic Flamenco singer Lola Flores and to Spain’s Romani Community.
The fan-run football club was eager to commemorate the city’s most famous daughter who would have celebrated her 100th birthday in 2023 with Flores passing away in 1995. ‘La Faraona’ as she was affectionally known, was born in Jerez de la Frontera and became an iconic figure in Spanish culture famous for her creative talent as an actress and singer. Flores married into a ‘Gitano’ (Spanish Roma) family and always identified strongly with the Romani community and culture with her own grandfather also being Romani.
Xerez Deportivo produced, not one but three, special edition Lola Flores commemorative jerseys with the club’s creative force Juan Pedro Vázquez explaining the process: “We were keen to pay tribute to Lola, as she is such an iconic figure and undeniably linked with the city of Jerez so we approached her family with the proposal and the initial idea was to just release one jersey in a deep red tone with that colour always associated with Lola and flamenco”.
The club’s head of communication Álvaro Richarte adds that the family were delighted with the proposal and as the creative process evolved, the idea came about to release two additional jerseys: a blue shirt featuring the Rainbow Flag representing the LGBTQ+ community, with Flores always a passionate defender of gay rights, and a green and blue jersey using the colours of the Romani flag accompanied by the 16-spoked chakra as an homage to Lola’s ancestry.
The jersey made its one-off debut on April 9th (2023), the day after International Romani Day, and brought good luck for the Andalusian side as part of a 2-1 home win over Mar Menor FC at the Estadio Municipal de Chapín.
Apart from the extensive national media generated by the shirts, the jerseys proved a massive hit commercially, and not just among the Xerez Deportivo faithful. The initiative was also picked up by the international shirt collector community, along with Lola Flores’ fans across the world with the project also receiving the backing of Spain’s largest Romani organisation, the Fundación Secretariado Gitano.
Richarte was delighted with the reaction to the jerseys, stating: “Even though this was not the first time the club has paid tribute to the Romani Community with our club captain previously wearing an armband featuring the ‘chakra’, the success of the shirts exceeded our expectations and I’m not sure that any future venture of this kind will generate so much media impact, and the jerseys are easily the biggest sellers in the short history of Xerez Deportivo”.
