Even those most reluctant to mix politics and football must acknowledge that national team tournaments are especially suited to that exercise. I keep thinking these days about Luis de la Fuente Castillo as a leader in the broadest sense of the word. Someone who leads a human group towards a hard goal, but who also occasionally addresses the nation he represents. He conveys messages of ancient wisdom, unrelated to current events, but still recognizable.
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This 65-year-old gentleman from La Rioja states that unity is more effective than particularism; that gratitude is the mindset with which he faces the privilege of occupying his position every morning; that success is never guaranteed, but effort is its necessary condition; that he is proud of the good manners with which his team conducts itself on and off the field; that nothing makes us happier than making others happy; that Spain is a nation, and that he is moved to see it united thanks to the work of its men.
But beyond the messages, Luis de la Fuente’s football itself is a way of doing politics that the footballized politicians have stopped doing. The triumphant rationality of Rodri and company challenges the fatalistic narrative that too many Spaniards keep telling ourselves to justify our proverbial aversion to reforms and excuse the rulers who delay them. That immovable trench, dug over centuries by mediocre historians and lazy columnists, abounds in the cliché of the Spaniard as an individualistic, anarchic, and passionate element, mired up to the knees in the well-known Goyaesque duel. Spain as a fertile land of tricksters and lacking scientists, because they will invent them later. The eternal Spain of Machado that prays and yawns wherever the wandering shadow of Cain crosses.
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But then we see this National Team play, moving the ball with precision and dispassion, linking passes with the fluidity of the thinker and the commitment of the bullfighter, dominating the opponent not with the fury of a mass nor by the decisive action of a providential being but through patient method and collective understanding. And we understand that Luis de la Fuente’s team is the metaphor of a functioning State. As if they were indeed not Spaniards. At least not those from the story.
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