Spain’s football unity shows regions the way
By The Financial Times
If a stricken Spain is seeking a role model, the best available is probably the footballer Xavi. The Spanish team’s little playmaker is not merely the sport’s supreme passer, the Catalan has also shown the way for Spaniards to feel both pride in their region and in the Spanish nation. Xavi stands for a Spain that is at once regional, national and international.
Spaniards watching Euro 2012 need cheering up. House prices keep sliding, one in four Spaniards is unemployed, Spain’s bonds are rated just above junk status, and despite last week’s offer of a bank bailout from the European Union, Spain may yet require a full international rescue programme. But if Spaniards want a gauge of their country’s advance in recent decades, the national team provides it.
From 1939 until his death in 1975, General Francisco Franco, Spain’s ruler, treated the team as a propaganda tool. His media shrouded matches in nationalist rhetoric. Players were encouraged to sing fascist songs.
There was even a Franquist style of football: the “furia española”, which supposedly expressed Spanish virility and passion. It was the playing style of an insular country, which knew little about international best practice in football or outside. A “furious” Spain generally lost.
Franco contaminated Spanish nationalism. Long after his death, many Catalans and Basques still shunned the national team, just as they regarded even the Spanish flag and the song “Y viva España” as far-right symbols.
Spain’s matches had modest television ratings. Instead, many Catalans regarded Barcelona as their de facto national team – “the unarmed army of Catalan nationalism”, the novelist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán called it – just as Basques supported Athletic Bilbao.
Things began changing in the 2000s. A Dutch-inspired passing style, imported by Barcelona in the 1970s as Spain entered European knowledge networks, was eventually adopted by the national team. Spain’s famed “tiki taka” style could have emerged only in the post-Franco European era.
Still the Spanish team needed cleansing of past nationalist associations. Before Euro 2008, Spain’s then coach, Luis Aragonés, redubbed the team “La Roja”, “The Red”. The nickname seemed (though Aragonés denied it) to break with the past and even reach out to the left. “To be a Roja in the civil war was to be anti-Franco,” notes Jimmy Burns in his recent book La Roja.
Then Spain won Euro 2008. After the final, the German footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger gave an interview while behind him a conga line of Spanish footballers belted out “Y viva España”. A day later, Xavi appeared before a Madrilene crowd yelling “¡Viva España!” It looked rather like the symbolic end of the civil war.
When Spain won the World Cup in 2010, many fans celebrated even in Bilbao and Barcelona. These people were not binning their regional identities. Rather, they felt both Basque and Spanish, or Catalan and Spanish. Xavi himself again showed the way: after the World Cup final, he ran around the field waving a Catalan flag. This was a new sort of nationalism, one that Franco would not have understood.
During this past club season, the fiercest rivalry in global football was between Barcelona and Real Madrid. Xavi was caught once, unaware a microphone was on, calling Madrid’s players “animals who paw at you”. Many worried whether the Barcelona and Madrid members of Spain’s team could reconcile for Euro 2012. They have.
The reigning world and European champions have looked perfectly united in their first two games against Italy and Ireland, hogging the ball for about two-thirds of each match.
A draw with Croatia in Gdansk on Monday night will put La Roja in the quarter-finals. All over Spain, people are watching. Meanwhile, the government battles to stay in the euro. But even if it fails, Spain will surely keep exchanging cutting-edge knowledge with other European countries and retain its improved emotional relationship between regions and centre. The new Spain still exists, and this team exemplifies it.