Barcelona, Jan 27 (EFE).- The Real’s bus is black. No Spanish team had it in this color. The idea came from Mikel Soro, official cartoonist of the ‘txuri-urdin’ club. “They wanted it to be a bit intimidating and impressive,” he reveals to EFE. It does not include player faces so it does not expire. La Real also causes a sensation when they arrive at the stadiums.
Soro, with the artistic name of ‘Marrazketabar’, explains his work to EFE in his studio in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona. “It was ‘heavy’ to paint the bus black. When I proposed to do it that way I thought they were going to freak out at my idea. But, sometimes, the Real responds to me with twice the daring ”, he adds.
Soro assures that “from the first moment” the club wanted him to push the idea forward. “I thought of black because it stood out more. Until then the Real buses had been blue and white. But blue and white have more prominence if they go on top of black. He was very convinced, ”he argues.
The other objective was that the drawing did not expire. That implied that the faces of the players could not appear or some characteristic that made them recognizable. “If you put a player and he leaves, you already have to change the design. We are looking for something expressive. The players, who can only see their torsos, grab their shirts and show the shield”, exposes the cartoonist.
‘Marrazketabar’, who has been a member of Real since he was a child, had many meetings with the club’s representatives before finalizing the final design. “There is a lot of work and a lot of people behind this creation,” he reports.
The black bus of Real Sociedad has been his last great creation, but before there have been other very outstanding ones. For example, the team’s mascot, ‘Txurdin’, who was ‘signed’ in September 2019. His face is the leather ball with the crown that stands out on the San Sebastian club’s shield.
“In the case of ‘Txurdin’, the work consisted of turning a drawing of a character that I made in the cartoons that I published on Twitter into a mascot. The fact that it became a costume was an idea from the Real, I thought that in Donosti there was no mascot, that it was a danger, ”he says jokingly.
Although the joke, for Soro, has a part of the truth. “I was surprised because in Guipúzcoa we are all quite quiet and a mascot seemed like it wasn’t going to flirt much. But those in charge of the Real were convinced of the idea and ‘Txurdin’ is now the idol of the youth”, he explains.
Soro was also the designer of the banners that Real put up in the Reale Arena during the remodeling works on the stadium and of the jerseys celebrating the Copa del Rey and Copa de la Reina titles that the Basque club won in 2021 and in 2019, respectively.
“When I grow up, what I am going to keep for myself are the mascot and having been at the moments in which Real won a title after many years in both the men’s and women’s. The drawing of the celebration shirts that they put on were my designs, ”she explains.
For Soro it was something utopian to achieve all this when in 2013 he began to draw pictures of the club of his loves on his own. “It was a time when the team was doing well, the season in which they qualified for the ‘Champions’. He had time. I had just finished my architecture degree and, because of the crisis, I had no job, ”she recalls.
And he continues: “The drawings became known on Twitter and went viral among the Real fans. Until there came a time when the club contacted me to see how I could introduce these drawings on their social networks and make shirts or other products.
The first commission was the design of street shirts with the players as protagonists.
“They had a fun touch. It turned them into superheroes and things like that”, says ‘Marrazketabar’.
Now he is one more protagonist of the exploits of the Royal Society.
Sergi Escudero
