The Euro Cup, like the Olympic Games, crowned an admirable school, the Spanish one. We celebrate it little, we forget it quickly and we don’t analyze it at all. As if Madrid and Barça had eaten up all of football, including this admirable National Team, in which Luis de la Fuente shuffles and gives again in each match with surprising results.
A proper context and a large critical mass gives outstanding individuals. Rodri is the king of football. Strange that it has gone to a midfielder, but even rarer is that the Ballon d’Or does not go to Xavi or Iniesta. After all, players who impose the rhythm, who give fluidity to the game, who clarify the game when disorder obscures it and who are capable of building beauty with a touch.
I do not intend to take away the hierarchy of the forwards, players who dynamite the games with their goals, unbalancing in the most complicated area of the field. Honor to all, starting with Vini so that Real Madrid fans don’t overwhelm me. But talking about midfielders is talking about Spanish football, an inexhaustible factory of players who know the science of the game.
As it was a week of reunion with the National Team, I will return to a topic that attracts me. The physicality impresses. One watches the anthem of countries with a colonialist past being sung, and the portentous presence of footballers of color is intimidating. We know since Pelé that the black race is made to play soccer divinely. Faced with these formidable athletes or those monumental specimens, like Haaland, who from northern Europe contribute more and more centimeters to the physical development of football, the normal thing is to cower. Here comes the beautiful thing about this story and about football. Spanish players look up at how the average height of the footballer grows each year, but they use intelligence, imagination and technique to confront them, subtle weapons that, with enough personality to impose themselves, end up dominating the game.
Let’s analyze a fact that usually goes unnoticed: the majority of professional soccer players are the youngest brother in the family. People who, to survive in the face of the physical superiority of their brothers, appeal to cunning, malice, skill, feint and all forms of imbalance that help compensate for the difference in size. If not, they don’t win. If not, they don’t have fun.
Spain became a school of we-take because he has the problem of the younger brother. You have to figure out how to make up the difference. It is the fight for survival, pure adaptation. Only when it is intelligence that feels challenged, everything is more interesting, more attractive. If he wins by colliding, dodge. If he wins running, I brake. If he wins by jumping, I anticipate or body. There are always ingenious formulas to overcome obvious superiority. Intelligence is implicit in all of them.
This should not be interpreted as a denunciation of the colossal bodies that the gym helps to sculpt. They are admirable in many ways. None of these gladiators is a legs. They play well to the point that there are many who cheer with their major league football. What I try to do is highlight the sophisticated and subtle weapons that football has always used and that excite me the most. The ingenuity with which the hidden talent competes, and often prevails, over the visible body. The memory of David Silva, the validity of Cazorla, the admirable Olmo, Pedri, Isco…
Rodri, elevated to the throne as number one, has a physique that contradicts the substance of this article. It’s already bad luck. But I have something to say in my defense: he plays as well as the short ones.
