At Montjuïc, Palestine Finds Home

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Dispatch: a series dedicated to immersive storytelling, where our photographers and writers journey to chosen places, combining evocative imagery with long-form editorials to uncover and share unique football cultures.

At Montjuïc, Palestine Found Home for an Evening

Words and Photography by Leyla Hamed

December 24 2025

BARCELONA, Spain — More than 30,000 people gathered on a Tuesday November night at Montjuïc for the match between Catalonia and Palestine. It wasn’t a final, nor an official fixture, yet nothing about the atmosphere felt routine. The stands offered an image rarely seen at friendlies like this, and the stadium became a space where football shared its spotlight with grief, solidarity and a sense of collective presence.

In Barcelona, these feelings did not come out of nowhere. This is a city where solidarity with Palestine has long been visible far beyond football, in its streets, its neighbourhoods, its everyday gestures. Only weeks earlier, hundreds of thousands had taken to the streets to demonstrate in support of Gaza. That collective memory was still close.

Inside the stadium, it translated naturally. Palestinian and Catalan flags shared space without friction. Banners and chants appeared without coordination, messages that didn’t need explaining. There was no sense of performance or forced spectacle. What filled the air was respect and, above all, a shared will to turn the pitch into a place of welcome.

Montjuïc is not a stadium you stumble into by chance. Reaching it requires leaving the centre of Barcelona and making the journey uphill, a detail that carries weight on a weekday night. That effort mattered. Every occupied seat felt like a conscious decision rather than routine. This didn’t look like a crowd that had come to consume football, but one that had chosen to accompany It.

In the days leading up to the match, Pep Guardiola had publicly encouraged people to come to this historic match, stressing the special nature of the occasion and the importance of being present. He wasn’t talking about line ups or competitiveness, but about showing up. That message seemed to run through the entire evening.

When the anthems played and the minute of silence arrived, the stadium fell into a kind of quiet rarely heard in football grounds. It wasn’t awkward, nor ceremonial. It was a silence held for players who were no longer there, and it carried a weight that needed no explanation.

The game was played, and Catalonia won 2–1, but the scoreline moved quietly in the background. There were goals, celebrations and moments of intensity, while every gesture from Palestine found an echo in the stands, even when it didn’t turn into real danger. For ninety minutes, the idea of home and away lost its weight.

From the stands, it was impossible to separate what was happening on the pitch from what was unfolding around it. The crowd reacted with an involvement unusual for a friendly. Every round of applause, every chant, felt like a way of saying we’re here. Not as a solution, nor as a definitive answer, but as a human gesture. Small, perhaps, but honest.

The evening also held a quieter layer of meaning on the Catalan side. Matches like this have long functioned as rare moments where Catalonia’s own footballing identity can be expressed on its own terms, outside official frameworks. In that shared space, solidarity did not feel one directional. The setting offered players a sense of ease to acknowledge it openly, through small gestures and presence, something reflected by several members of the Catalan squad, including Marc Bernal. Without the weight of institutional pressure, the game allowed football to speak softly, but clearly.

During the match, attention drifted toward the margins rather than the flow of play. A child wearing a Palestine shirt, lifting a scarf too big for him. A woman applauding every move by the visiting team with the same intensity she showed for the home goals. Conversations between strangers sharing impressions and emotions.

That sense of home also had to do with what this Palestinian team represents within football. It is a squad built from very different life paths that rarely intersect under normal circumstances. On the pitch stood players born in the diaspora, like Mostafa Zeidan or Milad Termanini, born in Sweden but choosing to wear the Palestinian shirt, alongside others like Hamed Hamdan and Khaled Nabris, born in Gaza, Oday Dabbagh from Jerusalem, or Rami Hamada from Shafa Amr.

They come from different realities. What outside football means distance and difficulty, within the national team becomes shared training sessions, camps, travel and a common goal. For a team that had not been able to play on its own land for six years, what happened that night in Barcelona carried a particular significance. For the first time, Palestine travelled to play a match on European soil, stepping onto a pitch usually associated with elite level football. Sharing that space, one so familiar to the global game, felt less like a contrast and more like recognition.

The crowd sustained that feeling until the final whistle. It didn’t react only to goals. It held the atmosphere even when the tempo dropped. For a friendly, that level of engagement was unusual. There was no sense of a staged event or an empty gesture.

The match’s charitable purpose reinforced that reading. All proceeds were directed to aid projects, a detail many in the stands mentioned as part of why they had come. Not from the belief that football can solve everything, but from the understanding that shared gestures, when honest, still matter.

When the referee blew for full time, the stadium rose in applause. It wasn’t about the scoreline, but about having taken part in something bigger than the game. A recognition of presence, effort and what had been represented on the pitch. The match was over, but the sense of having experienced something bigger than football lingered.

In a football world that rarely slows down, moments like this feel almost fragile. Not because they transform everything, but because they remind us that football, at its best, can still offer unity, dignity and a quiet sense of hope. —

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