I have been in Spain for the whole of last week and I was lucky enough to catch two of the most famous, several centuries old celebrations of the region of Catalunya: Barcelona’s “Festa Major de Gràcia” and Sitges’ “Festa Major”, Gràcia being a Barcelona’s neighbourhood and Sitges a town outside Barcelona.

Festa Mayor de Gràcia

The amazing feeling of a community tied together by an ancestral bond, the magnetic energy coming out from those events have been a living sample of all those values that we can find in Sport and Online Technology.
Whatever I looked, wherever I was, it was full of similarities with a Sport event, even more: it was the prototype of the dream fan base.

It works in this way: for months, kids, teenagers, adults up to elderly members of the community spend a lot of their free time to plan a theme for the next “Festa”, trying to come up with the best idea for a “make up” of their street/s that will compete against other streets and neighbourhoods.

Festa Major de Gràcia

For months the whole community interacts, works together, exchanges opinions and support, builds decorations and artefacts that will be mounted and displayed during the celebration (I am posting a few images).

The teamwork climax of the community is reached with the “Castell”, the human tower: members of the neighbourhood build a human tower of even more than 10 levels by climbing on each others’ shoulders. As you can imagine the level of trust and collaboration has to be absolute: usually adult men are the foundation of the tower and act also as a safety net for the upper levels, while the age of the tower elements decreseases with the upper levels up to the very top, usually a very small child.

Castell in Sitges

What are the values I found in those communities during the celebrations? Here are my keywords: Openness, Sharing, Collaboration, Interaction, Communities, Networking, ‘Tribe’, Passion, Loyalty, Commitment, Desire, Involvement, Community, Belonging, Family.

Can you recognise them? They are the same core values shared by Sport and Online Technology.

Can we take home some learning from those amazing social events? We should.

Passion and loyalty don’t come only with victories, they come through a bond between people, between fan and fan, fan and players, club and team, club and city, club and region, if not nation.

Online technology today gives us the tools to build all this: it takes time, it takes a lot of hard work, but it also takes a lot of authenticity and strong values that tools and platforms need to be filled with, as otherwise they would just be cold, empty, lifeless containers.

The US BIG EAST Conference Athletics gives us a great example of legend/myth building with its sixovertimes.com website, building on top of an historic game while in parallel developing revenue opportunities with the sale of related, celebrative items.

My last thought on the train back last night was about Technology: nice to note that while it is becoming more and more powerful, opening doors and opportunities like never before, at the same time it is increasing more than ever the importance of elements like humanity, authenticity, personal relationships and contribution.

Alessandro De Zanche