The League of (very) ordinary men | TV

Monica Marchante account in The League of Extraordinary Lords (Movistar Plus +) that one day, while he was working, a boy blurted out: “Do you take everything besides the microphone?”. It was not the time of Mari Carmen Izquierdo – noting to ask someone to dedicate a series, a film or a documentary to her essential figure -, a pioneer of the female presence in sports journalism, but the end of the Eighties, when women were no longer anomaly in any job market. There is, in addition to machismo, racism and homophobia, the surprising revelation that in the 1990s women were forbidden to enter stages such as Real Madrid de Sanz or Betis de Lopera.

The documentary portrays a handful of fairly ordinary men whitewashed by reporters who called rudeness “character”, their delinquent attitudes “strong personality” and what years later the courts considered embezzlement “love of color.” There are those who say, with a certain inexplicable nostalgia, that the grotesque events that are narrated are in harmony with the society of the time, that “those were other times”. I doubt it, I don’t remember that in the nineties that I experienced homophobia, machismo and racism they practiced with light and stenographers, a privilege granted only to a handful of boys for whom some journalists acted as umbrellas and loudspeakers and they too have become icons pop by dint of laughing at them for a joke they didn’t have.

There is a particularly painful outburst, a reporter makes Gil ugly for being late to a press conference and treats her with shameful condescension in the face of complicit laughter from her colleagues. That complicity was what gave wings to very harmful characters, and “other times” the screen behind which some now hide the shame of having accepted the unacceptable.

You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISION on Twitter apuntarte here to receive our weekly newsletter.