It’s not advisable to get so invested in anything that you’re using Twitter’s built-in Bing Translator feature and your own busted grasp of Spanish grammar to discern what ultras—and they are ultras; some of them killed a Deportivo fan a few years back—are complaining about. It’s the new stadium, or it’s how the club might change an anthem that has its charms while also sounding like barroom opera, and you don’t know why you’re reading what you’ve read many times before, but it’s the offseason, flat sun-baked dirt as far as they eye can see, and you’re putting off editing the novel, and maybe if you stick around you’ll catch some Diego Costa news. You care about this stuff, kind of, but you’re mostly wondering if he’s signed yet. You dead man’s float in the dumb swirl for twenty minutes, then get back to fussing with the word order.

Amid this summertime torpor, there is a real thing happening here. Atlético Madrid are entering what you might call their corporate era. It would be inaccurate to describe what came before it as pre-corporate, but it was rickety and volatile and strange. Now they aspire toward frictionless Juventus-like competence. The club are dressing for the job they want, moving out of their beloved crumbling dino in the heart of Madrid to a modern 68,000-seater called the Wanda Metropolitano in a nearby northern suburb—Madridista country, Atléticos will tell you. They’ve redesigned their crest, which is to say they’ve bleached all the character out of the old one. This season’s kits have diagonal slashes up and down the shirt that interrupt the customary red and white stripes. 

All of this has set fan groups a-grumbling: staging protests and merchandise boycotts and primarily sending lots of pissed off tweets. There’s not a little ugly stubbornness to it, but it emanates from a genuine fear that the club might be drifting away from those who care about it most, the folks who plan and construct the pregame tifos and sing throughout the matches. They’ve invested heavily—emotionally and otherwise—in Atlético Madrid, and their concerns aren’t being heeded. 

The stadium change is a big deal, but if the other stuff sounds picayune, it’s because it is. This is an argument among adopted family, whole wings of which hate each other, which is to say there are a lot of byzantine resentments with half-remembered origins and mountain-sized molehills involved. Faces are reddening and ceramics are flying over dinner seating when the anger is actually about deeper and darker betrayals.

In short, Atlético Madrid are a stolen club. Jesús Gil—a Franco crony and blatantly corrupt businessman, politician, and bigot—was elected club president in 1987 and four years later, when every first and second division club in Spain except for Athletic, Barcelona, Madrid, and Osasuna became obliged to convert from a member-based institution into a limited liability company, Gil became the club’s majority owner with 236,056 shares. During his time in charge, he laundered money through Atleti, temporarily shuttered their youth academy, hired and fired managers with aplomb, and paid unconscionable transfer fees and salaries that drove the club into existence-threatening debt. He also never paid for those shares. A Spanish judge ruled more than a decade and a half after the fact that Gil assumed control of Atlético Madrid illegally, but the statute of limitations on the crime had run out, so there were no consequences. These days, Jesús’s son Miguel Angel and Gil family friend Enrique Cerezo run the club. They’ve done an okay job, all things considered. Almost all the debt has been paid down and the team is as talented as it has ever been. But Gil and Cerezo aren’t exactly populists. They pay only lip service to fans. They’re widely loathed.

Having been conned once already, Atléticos are understandably uneasy whenever the earth begins to move beneath their feet. Nearly every group of fans think they’re the best and most passionate in the whole damn world, and this self-righteousness can wear you out, but to be fair in this case to the self-righteous: at a club that’s been through frequent violent change, in a country whose sporting culture that is, in certain corners, sleepy and noncommittal, Atleti fans have maintained a hard-won identity—even if it’s only just a feeling built around colors and a particular part of town. They like to think the club is more like Liverpool or Dortmund than United or Bayern Munich. You can call this a working class or underdog ethic. Maybe those terms are too pious or flattering. Put in more concrete terms, the crowds at the Vicente Calderón were committed and really, really loud. It would be a shame if future Atleti games lacked that atmosphere.

Of course, fans would prefer their team be good, which Atleti are right now, and they’re trying to keep that run going with the money the Metropolitano will generate and the It’s Your Old Friend, PepsiCo!-style rebrand they’re undertaking. Paris Saint-Germain are throwing around literal chunks of an energy-rich nation’s GDP. Keeping up in today’s game takes sacrificing some down-hominess in the name of unsentimental revenue generation. This isn’t strictly right or wrong, though it is gross, and fans blanching against it is about them proclaiming their desire to be talked to like people rather than consumers, not that they don’t want the club to be able to afford Antoine Griezmann’s salary. But then global megabrands don’t know what an individual person even is. Earnestly voiced concerns end up seeming silly.

I don’t know that it’s possible for Atlético Madrid to get as big as they want to be and still keep their soul. They might hit a point where they price or drive out their core fanbase, become blander and more tightly buttoned down. Maybe this is an inevitable stage of success in soccer circa 2017 and maybe it’s a process the club’s unscrupulous owners are accelerating. This is pretty amorphous stuff. What is identity when there are hundreds of millions of dollars involved? It’s a concept Atleti are struggling with—the fans, Cerezo and Gil, the institution itself. As they move forward, we probably won’t know what they’re losing until it’s already gone. They’ll make more money for sure, and perhaps they’ll keep competing with Europe’s very best, but the true cost of making that happen is yet to be determined.

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