For years now, the Spanish team has returned to the middle ground of neutrality or lukewarmness, that territory of insensitivity that one day overthrew the best generation in history: a collection of talent and virtuosity embodied in players like Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, … Xabi Alonso, Ramos, Villa, Fernando Torres… The team that made us champions and enjoyed football had, in addition to the artistic gene, a greater virtue: winning.
Football is, as Luis Aragonés’s obsessive diatribe made famous, winning and winning, and winning again. There is no other antidote in elite sport to indolence or words. The facts rule above the aesthetics and the selection should have no other objective than that, to win.
The sporting culture in Spain, especially in football, lies in the ascendancy exercised by the winners, those who dominate an ecosystem. Any detail about Rafa Nadal is infinitely interesting above the effort or injuries, even if they are the same or greater, than any other Spanish tennis player. Fernando Alonso’s personality bewitches because one day he dominated an underground sport. His legacy is a weight for others. We were motivated every night round of the NBA because Pau Gasol went straight to a championship ring.
And club culture works in football, above all the Madrid-Barça rivalry. Unless the team wins. Then a parenthesis opens, everyone puts on the red shirt and for a while the Real Madrid or Barcelona worries that sometimes make the daily football news unbearable are put to rest. That team, first led by Luis Aragonés and then Vicente del Bosque, was pride above colors. People pushed for both Iniesta’s goal and Casillas’ save or Fernando Torres’ gallops.
Three disappointing World Cups and a couple of Euro Cups without finals have generated the usual look of waning enthusiasm towards the team, even though the Nations League title is appropriately sold by the federating bodies as a superior achievement. The Euro Cup is the official measure, the sensor that must decree size, abundance or disappointment.
Two worlds
Cycle changes usually provide commonplaces, abysses into which clubs or teams fall until talent is renewed. Spain went from Luis Enrique and his press conferences in the context of the conflict and the brawl to Luis de la Fuente and his conception of good people as an unavoidable argument for attending the calls. Two worlds. From the lion to the peacemaker. A transit that needed time in a toxic climate coming from the offices of the Federation.
De la Fuente has tried to reverse the trend that has prevailed in Spain for centuries. He said in his first press conference that he wanted 48 million players and not 48 million selectors. Or in the words of Vicente del Bosque, every fan in Spain knows one of his people to go to the national team. Luis de la Fuente’s message will have permeated depending on what areas that are difficult to assess beyond subjective perception, but the only reality that can be applied is the results table. Win, win and win again.
A group of players for the very coffee-loving people attend the Eurocup. The general public, those who became en masse hooked on Nadal’s heroic marathons or got into Alonso’s champion Renault decades ago and did not know a word about hard or soft tires, will turn on the switch of excitement if the team plays and wins, if it dominates Croatia, Italy and Albania in the group stage, if it generates that shared and indefinable motivation that corresponds to charisma.
At the moment the general public does not easily distinguish Zubimendi from Álex Baena, to name two names at random. The fan lacks that empathy with the surnames of solvent and effective players, very valuable professionals, but who have not yet penetrated the world of collective emotions. Rodri, Morata, Carvajal, Nacho, Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams have crossed that border due to their careers in clubs.
The model
Spain still preserves some principles that come from that glorious world and European champion team, which many footballers of the current team have never seen play, not even in YouTube videos. It is the model of the percentage of possession, the high pressure to recover the ball, the neat exit with the ball and the play with the goalkeeper’s feet as a non-negotiable argument.
To this formula extended from the summit of the Champions League to the youth neighborhood matches, the selection adds a personalized and hopeful script, the two wing players. Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams appear in the nostrils of fans as guarantors of a different, virtuous and lethal alternative. Two players to think big and dream of a national team again because they convince and win.
