Joan Maria Pou: "It was a life-changing experience when my father told me we were going to live with someone else and another child."

Joan Maria Pou (Barcelona 1974) is a journalist. Since 2000, he has been reporting on FC Barcelona matches for RAC1.

She lost her mother very early. "My mother died very young, at 26, when I was seven months old. Then we went to live with my grandmother in Sant Gervasi, until I was 12."

Four siblings arrived. "My father, when I was 12, remarried a woman who had a son, Aniol, five years younger and who, curiously, is not my biological brother, but he is the one I lived with the longest. And then, from this second marriage, Marc, Ferran, and Maria were born."

It was a big change. "When my father told me we were leaving my grandmother, the woman who raised me until I was 12, and that we were going to live with someone else, and with another child at that, it was a life-changing experience. I almost lost my picture in the first quarter of that school year." However, it was a good change. "I gained four siblings. And I began to be raised by a young woman. Being raised by a grandmother has many good aspects, but it also has bad aspects. Marta brought a certain modernity, a much more feminist perspective."

She studied at the French Lycée in Barcelona. "My grandfather enrolled my father at the French Lycée in 1948 or 1949 because it was a way to escape from Franco's school system. When my father had to enroll me in 1977, when we still didn't know where the country was going, he decided to continue the experience."

Did you play soccer in the playground? "For many years, you weren't allowed to bring a ball. I remember that once we'd eaten our breakfast sandwich, we'd take all the aluminum foil, gather it up, and use tape to harden it, and that would become the ball we played with."

After school. "I played at home, read comics, and when I grew up, I started playing sports, basketball, tennis..." And soccer? "I come from a basketball family. My father played for many years, my uncle reached the First Division, and I ended up being a coach."

The summer camp

He doesn't remember any vocation from when he was little, but he has anecdotes that already gave clues. "For many years I was a counselor at a summer camp in Pla de l'Estany. When the kids played on the soccer field, I watched them from the kitchen. I grabbed the microphone to call the children and narrated how they played. And they loved it."

The summer camp left its mark on him. "Mas Pagès was a key place in my childhood. There I discovered a way of relating very different from the French Lycée and one that was much more suited to who I was. I met two of my best friends there." He spent many summers there. "I went from about 12 to 14 years old. We formed a group and the director, who was the mother of one of the students, wanted us to continue; she asked us to become premonitors. And finally, we completed the monitor course and worked from 17 to 21 years old."

Her father is a doctor. "He has always transmitted that vocation, that passion, to me, but he never conditioned me. When the time came to choose between science and literature, he would say to me: "You tell me what you want to do, try to do it well, and that's it."

And journalism? "At 17, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I entered the Autonomous University of Madrid, in Economics. There, the idea of ​​​​doing a second cycle of journalism did exist, but at the beginning of the second year, I saw that I shouldn't wait that long, and before Christmas, I dropped out. For the seven months until the next academic year, I worked, sold fruit in Simago de la Rambla, and was a coach... And in September, I started journalism. After finishing my first radio practice, I left the studio with my eyes lit up, and the teacher told me: "I think there's something here." And from then until today, radio has been my professional passion."