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Spain Sport Power
Spain's Sporting Power
The Miracle of Spanish Sport: Champions in football and many other things
Ozren Podnar
Why is Spain so successful in sports? Well, because it is not one, but several countries.
Spain is the world's foremost sporting power. Spain is now a super power in collective sports and quite good in individual sports too. In the two most popular sports in Europe, soccer and basketball, Spain is number one both in the world and on the continent. No other nation has ever held that distinction, not even (West) Germany or France. They were also world and continental champions in soccer at one time, but not in basketball.
In basketball, Spain are the current world champions (since Japan 2006) and the European champions (as of Poland 2009), while at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, only a selection of the leading NBA players finished ahead of the Red Furies. Their principal star, Pau Gasol, has picked up his second NBA title with the LA Lakers and is already considered by many as this country's top basketball player of all time. His former team, Barcelona, won their second European League last spring.
Spain also boasts the best male tennis player in Rafael Nadal, who will certainly be remembered as one of the all-time greats. Four other Spanish players were in the top-20 in the week following Spain's World Cup success in South Africa.
In motor racing, Ferrari's Fernando Alonso is the two-time F1 world champion during his spell with Renault. His success has boosted Spaniards' interest in F1 and new drivers have been coming along ever since.
In motorbike racing, Alonso's fellow countrymen have distinguished themselves on many occasions over the past decades. They are a permanent fixture on the podium in the 125cc, Moto2 and MotoGP categories.
In cycling, many remember Perico Delgado and Miguel Indurain, a Tour de France winner on five consecutive occasions in the nineties. Their successor, Alberto Contador, is the favourite to win this year's Tour after coming out top in 2007 and 2009, along with triumphs in the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a Espana.
Handball, another supremely popular sport in Europe, also has Spain as one of its principal protagonists. The world champions in 2005 and bronze medalists at the 2008 Olympics have one of the two strongest national leagues in Europe, the other being the German Bundesliga. The Spanish clubs, namely Ciudad Real, Portland San Antonio and Barcelona, have perennially been among the top 5-6 European teams.
Success boosted by internal rivalry
Some claim that Spain's success is the consequence of the social openness created by the democratization of the country after dictator Francisco Franco's death in 1975. That could have had some impact, but is not the key. Spain's success is more due to the fact that what is internationally known as one country is in fact several rival countries who compete with each other in the field of sports.
It's unlikely that more than 5 per cent of foreigners that idolize various Spanish athletes are aware of this fact. For most, Spain is a country inhabited by Spaniards who speak the Spanish language. This is very far from reality (imagine someone saying that Great Britain is inhabited by Brits speaking the English language, forgetting about the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish peoples).
Spaniard is an administrative term indicating a person holding Spanish citizenship, nothing more. There is no common Spanish national identity (except for now, ironically, after an unprecedented string of the soccer team's successes, which have made all Spanish citizens proud). The Catalans have Catalan national identity, the Galicians have Galician identity, the Basques the Basque identity and these identities are not merely, or even mostly, regional. These are three distinct ethnic groups with own histories and languages, who strive for full independence.
Then there are the Valencians, closely related (and somewhat hostile) to the Catalans, with whom they share the Catalan language, which they call Valencian, much to linguists' amusement. The same language is spoken in the Balearics, but on the islands it is called Majorcan and Menorcan, respectively, fully in the regional spirit (and showing how strong the Spanish regional rivalries are, even within the same linguistic and cultural group).
Even the Andalusians, while not a distinct national group, have a regional identity so strong that it sets them apart from the rest of the country. On the other hand, Castilians, the citizens of the two central regions, Castile-La Mancha and Castile-Leon, are Spaniards par excellence and their language, Castilian, has spread to the whole of Spain as the official, or co-official language (and to most of Central and South America for that matter).
People of the regions where Castilian is the only official language, including Cantabria, Aragon, Extremadura or the Canaries, mostly consider themselves simply "Spanish", although the regional identities and cultural differences are very important even there.
Well, these internal rivalries have spurred each autonomous region, and specially Catalonia, Valencia and the Basque country, to produce top-notch athletes who whenever they perform actually promote their own people, or nation, as the Catalans, Basques or Galicians call themselves. The same mentality is present in Castile, the only difference being the motivation: the Castilian athletes promote Spanish nationalism as the only correct national sentiment in Spain.
United...for now
This is, essentially, the underlying reason why the Castilian Real Madrid and Catalan Barcelona are two of the biggest half dozen soccer and basketball clubs in the world: each of them is a sort of national team for their region, and represent that region's culture and philosophy.
Very curiously, just as the Spanish Constitutional Court rejected Catalonia's claim to nationhood, declaring that only Spain itself is a nation, Spain's different national and cultural groups experienced something of a unity when their "national" soccer (or rather, multinational) team went all the way in South Africa. The Madrid daily As printed a very effective headline "Visca Espana" (Long live Spain), merging the Catalan "visca" and the Castilian "Espana" after the ultra-Catalan Carles Puyol scored the winner against Germany in the semis.
People celebrated the Furia Roja's victories even in Barcelona, although it is questionable whether those present in the fiestas were real Catalans or perhaps guest workers from other, less affluent regions.
Still, being world champions in soccer confers so much pride that most Catalans, Valencians, Basques or Galicians for once voluntarily set aside their claims for independence or more autonomy and voiced their affiliation to Spain as a whole. Who wouldn't? It's certainly more rewarding to identify oneself with the world's best soccer nation than with any other nation who, say, finished fourth or failed to qualify in the first place.
Recently the former Yugoslavia coach Ivica Osim said he always thought that his team could have saved the multi-ethnic federation from a bloody disintegration had Yugoslavia won the 1990 World Cup. On that occasion, a ten-man Yugoslavia were eliminated on penalties by an awful, inferior Argentina in the quarterfinals. They would have played hosts Italy in the semis (whom Argentina went on to beat, also on penalties).
Could soccer have saved Yugoslavia?
"I often find myself wondering what would have been if we at least made it to the finals," said the Croat Osim, a legend in Japanese as well as in Yugoslav soccer.
"Maybe the different peoples that made up Yugoslavia would have accepted the Yugoslav federation as their own," continued Osim, before dismissing those speculations as overly fantastic.
Ironically, the greatest Yugoslav soccer team (except for, maybe, the fifties' generation) never got the chance to perform at the highest level. After qualifying for Euro 1992 ahead of Denmark and Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia disintegrated and the Croats (Boban, Suker, Prosinecki, Boksic, Asanovic, Jarni, Stanic, Stimac, Ivkovic), Muslims (Omerovic, Hadzibegic, Bazdarevic, Kodro), Slovenes (Katanec) and Macedonians (Pancev, Najdoski) abandoned the federal team, on the way to joining their newly-founded national teams.
The Serbs (Stojkovic, Mihajlovic, Jugovic, Jokanovic, Binic, Lukic) and Montenegrins (Savicevic, Mijatovic) were willing to play at the Euro 1992 finals in Sweden, but the United Nations and consequently FIFA and UEFA, banned the rump Yugoslavia (as Serbia-Montenegro continued to call themselves for a while) from competing.
The "whole" Yugoslav national team, with all the nationalities included, might have cruised to the European title and, why not, to the world championship in 1994. Player-by-player, Germany, Holland and Denmark would have been dwarfed by the immensity of joint Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-Montenegrin etc. talent. Still, the Serb newspapers never got the chance of printing headlines like Ziveli Jugoslaveni (Long live Yugoslavs) in a mixture of Serbian and Croatian languages. We will never know how the things would have played out. Only the dream of a wonder team remains in the minds of Osim and millions of southern Slavic soccer lovers:
Yugoslav Dream Team
Ivkovic; Jugovic, Hadzibegic, Mihajlovic, Jarni; Prosinecki, Stojkovic, Boban, Savicevic; Pancev, Boksic
Subs: Omerovic, Najdoski, Stimac, Bilic, Jokanovic, Katanec, Asanovic, Mijatovic
Coach: Ivica Osim
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