Spain's football victory and us

There are two reasons why I am writing this column. One is to congratulate Spain for their magnificent football playing against Italy. Their victory has gained them admiration and praise at a time when their country is suffering from economic doldrums. 

I like best the article Jimmy Burns wrote for The Independent. He connected Spain’s football triumph with nation-building. The title of the article: How football can rebuild a nation. Burns is the author of ‘La Roja: A Journey through Spanish Football’ (Simon & Schuster) so his interpretation goes beyond the game. He starts with the history of football in Spain and how warring regional factions came together as one nation when Spain won the game.

“Spain’s self-confidence may have been badly damaged by being at the begging end of the euro crisis, but its Euro 2012 victory should act as a reviving tonic. The conquest in Kiev confirmed the Spanish team’s status as the best in the history of football, and a glowing example to present and future generations of fans and players. But beyond a sporting achievement, La Roja (The Red One) — as the Spanish squad is called — provides a role model for a debt-ridden country struggling to define its national interest.”

How the Spaniards arrived at this thinking has a history. Red was the color worn by the national squad for as long as most Spaniards can remember. Burns says it was during the Franco years when ”football was manipulated for propaganda purposes by a fascist regime that contaminated and distorted the nature of Spanish nationhood.”

Catalans and Basques shunned the Spanish national team and “even after Franco’s death, with fans channeling their political passions into the intense rivalries that developed between Real Madrid (representing the centre) and clubs like FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao, de facto Catalan and Basque squads.”

But things changed in 2008, continues Burns in his perceptive analysis. Spanish coach of the national squad Luis Aragonés “felt that enough water had flowed under Spain’s political bridge for Spaniards to call a team’s shirt by its proper color.” It was time that red be every Spaniard’s color. But more than that “La Roja (the Red) has come to be equated with a cultural phenomenon — football played with such finesse and artistry that commentators have drawn analogies with ballet and poetry in motion.”

During Sunday’s victory celebrations there was unity in diversity with Basque and Catalan players waving their regional flags, and an Andalucian Real Madrid player flourishing a bullfighting cape, and fans from all areas of Spain paying tribute to Iniesta, Xavi, and Jordi Alba, some of the Barcelona stars of La Roja — all showing that you can take pride in being Spanish while having a sense of regional identity.”

The article credits the political triumph to La Roja’s current coach, Vicente Del Bosque, a wise and conciliatory man from Salamanca.

He reminds us that far from being a failed state, it is a country capable of doing great things when finding a sense of common purpose.

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This brings me to the second reason why Spanish football is important to us, Filipinos. Like the Catholic religion, football was something brought to us by colonial Spain. It had its flaws and evils but it also had benefits. One of them was the tradition of football in the Philippines (until the Americans supplanted it with basketball) writes Orion Dumdum, a young constitutional reform advocate for the Philippines.

He juxtaposed the tradition of football and Spanish presence in the Philippines with a specific form of governance — parliamentarism. We lost these two traditions one in sports and the other in governance along the way.

A shift in sports and a shift in politics is what we need to reconnect with those roots. Dumdum cites two Filipinos, Paulino Alcantara who played for Barcelona as the greatest footballer of all time. The other is Marcelo Azcárraga, who became a Prime Minister of Spain three times. But how many Filipinos know of it today?

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“Paulino Alcántara is a good example that as Filipinos, we have it in us to succeed in football,” he writes. And although the Azkals have not yet reached their mettle they have begun the first steps to “reclaiming our glory in a sport more suited to us.”

Paulino Alcantara was born in 1896 in Iloilo to a Spanish father and an Ilongga mother, Paulino Alcántara y Riestrá. He was raised in the Philippines until he was between the age of 13 and 14 and moved to Barcelona where he was discovered and given the chance to join the professional FC Barcelona team where he became known as “El Romperedes” — the “net breaker,” as he is known to have broken nets due to the sheer strength of his kicks.

To this day Paulino Alcantara remains Barça’s record holder with a total of 357 goals having appeared with FC Barcelona 357 times, and no one has come close to beating his record as a phenomenal striker. He is most remembered for a game against France in 1922, here he scored a powerful goal from 30 yards away, with the French goalkeeper having been totally unable to prevent it from coming through.

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In Azcarraga, he adds there is also in us “a solid example of the ability of Filipinos to perform well within a parliamentary system.”

Azcarraga had a Basque Spanish father (a general, later turned bookseller) and a mestiza-Bicolana mother who studied law at the Universidad de Santo Tomás in Manila (UST) before moving on to the Nautical School and then transferred to Spain to attend a military academy. He was given the Golden Fleece award for defending the Spanish Monarchy and is the highest possible award that any person can be awarded in Spain.

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If Burns juxtaposed Spain’s victory in Kiev as a tool for Spain’s nationhood in these times, so does Dumdum’s article argue that “a shift to football and a shift to parliamentary government in the Philippines” may be the tools to energize the Filipino nation.

“It will serve us well to derive inspiration from numerous other societies and more importantly re-embrace our Spanish heritage. After all, Spain is both a football-centric country and uses a parliamentary system and we share a much deeper set of commonalities with Spain than with the USA.”