- Real Sociedad faces Tel Aviv Maccabi in Belgrade tomorrow (due to security problems they will not play in Israel), the club said. Some supporters of the txuri-urdin team have asked Real to make some gesture in favour of the Palestinians, but President Jokin Aperribay has made it clear that they will not. "We are going to play a football game; we are not the referees of the competition," he added.
"I want to talk about three things," he said. "First with hope, second with security and then with football. We are committed to peace and, of course, express our solidarity with the Palestinian people. And peace is not built with immobility, but with dynamism. On October 7, 2023, a Gipuzkoan, Ivan Illarramendi, died with his wife. We want peace, the war has to end and the kidnapped have to return to their country," he said in statements to the media after the announcement of eta.
Regarding "football" issues, the president of the Real Sociedad has assured that "they are not judges of the competition". "What we're going to do tomorrow is play a football game and try to win. We would like football to serve to unite peoples, people and feelings, to work for peace. La Real will work, from football, so that we have a better future. That we bind Maccabi can be unfair with a war. UEFA asks us to maintain a normal attitude, which has more to do with people than with countries."
It would not, however, be the Royal Society the first club to join Israel’s sports teams with the war. Even the Israelis themselves have placed themselves in the war on Palestine to call for the release of the abductees (both in football and in the basketball match), to support Israeli soldiers or to help the victims of the attacks of the HAMAS "terrorists" through the Maccabi World Union. It is precisely the Maccabi that is the Israeli national team, in part "representative" of the government, which plays where it plays, which is clear.
Genocide, not a single mention
If Aperribay had been asked a question to the president of any other football team in Europe, he would probably answer the same. That they want peace for both Palestine and Israel, that war has to end, that the mission of football clubs is nothing other than playing football, which serves not to distribute football, but to unite people, that we do not have to mix politics and sport, etc. Few will mention "genocide", or 45,000 deaths by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Among the words of the president of the Real Sociedad, perhaps the novelty is that we are talking about "dynamism" to say that it will do nothing.
On the other hand, it should be borne in mind that Aperribay has a link with the tree sector.