Winning a World Cup brings medals, parades and, if you happen to come from one particular Spanish town, a great many tomatoes. Fabián Ruiz and Gavi, two of Spain's World Cup winners, have each been given their own weight in tomatoes by their hometown, ESPN reports.
The tradition
The custom belongs to Los Palacios y Villafranca, a town of about 35,000 people in Andalusia, in southern Spain, known for growing tomatoes.
According to ESPN, the town honored the two players on Tuesday at the town hall, matching each with his weight in the local crop: Ruiz, of Paris Saint-Germain, weighs 84 kilograms (185 pounds), and Gavi, of Barcelona, 68 kilograms (150 pounds). The practice dates to 2010, when Jesús Navas became the town's first World Cup winner and received the same honor. The town has kept it up "after each World Cup and European Championship trophy," ESPN reports, honoring Navas, then Ruiz, and now Gavi.
A town that grows footballers
The detail that lifts this above a novelty is what it says about one small place.
Los Palacios y Villafranca has now produced three World Cup winners, which is a remarkable output for a town of its size. It is a place defined by two things, tomatoes and, increasingly, football, and the tradition fuses them into a single civic ritual. Weighing a returning champion against the crop that the town is known for is a way of claiming him as its own: not a distant star but a local product, measured in the most local currency available.
Why the small stories matter too
Set beside the events that usually follow a World Cup, a brawl on the pitch, a FIFA inquiry, debates about punishment, this is a deliberately gentle footnote, and that is the point of running it.
Major tournaments generate their share of conflict and controversy. They also generate this: a town hall in Andalusia, a set of scales, and a pile of tomatoes weighed out against a hometown hero. It is a reminder that the game is not only its disputes and its money but also its rituals of belonging, the odd, affectionate ways that communities mark one of their own having gone out into the world and won. Gavi, who spent part of this week at the center of the final's ill-tempered aftermath, ended it being weighed against a heap of tomatoes in the town where he grew up. Both are the World Cup, too.
