Spain’s thrilling right and left wingers help sideline cultural tension

In 1912, Antonio Machado penned a short, untitled poem in which he warned Spanish infants coming into the world they were born into a divided Spain: “May God take mercy on you/One of the two Spains will freeze your heart”.

Machado’s Yeatsian cry prefigured the bloodshed unleashed in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and marked out a Spain of two faces: reactionary nationalists on the right, enthralled with the Catholic Church; and progressive, tolerant liberals on the left who were anticlerical. Spaniards have always followed priests with a candle or a club. A glance at the thrilling Spain team and its management in the European Championship in Germany suggests the cultural tension of “the two Spains” lives on.

Nacho, for example, started for Spain in their opening match against Croatia. Last month, after collecting the Champions League trophy as Real Madrid captain, he took to the pitch with a bullfighter’s cape, aping a matador’s passes. His sons trailed behind him as chants of “¡Olé!” rang around Wembley. Bullfighting is a contentious issue in Spain. When Catalonia, one of 17 regions in Spain, outlawed bullfighting in 2010, Barça’s captain at the time, Carles Puyol, and several team-mates, were vocal in supporting the ban. Bullfighting is part of a culture that doesn’t represent all of Spain.

Last August, Luis Rubiales, then head of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, called an extraordinary general meeting in which he announced manically his refusal to stand down as president. He was under pressure from the Spanish government and global football administrators to resign after kissing star player, Jenni Hermoso, on the lips without her consent on the podium after Spain won the women’s World Cup. Rubiales claimed he was the victim of a “manhunt”.

Women soccer players speak of ‘systematic and calculated abuse’ after historical allegations

---

Brazil revamp needs time, says coach Dorival, after Copa America exit to Marcelo Bielsa’s Uruguay

---

Second half comeback sees Netherlands battle past Turkey

---

As Rubiales railed against what he described as “fake feminism”, the manager of the men’s national football team, Luis de la Fuente, clapped him on from the front row of the auditorium. De la Fuente later apologised for his behaviour and lack of courage in failing to reach out to Hermoso in support, but it was telling he waited until after Rubiales got suspended by Fifa before making his public apology. Was he waiting to see which way the wind blew?

Rubiales, in a parting shot before finally resigning, handpicked his successor, Pedro Rocha, the man sitting alongside Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin as Spain knocked Georgia out of Euros last Sunday night. In April, as part of an investigation into corruption during the Rubiales reign, Rocha was called to give evidence. State prosecutors were so alarmed by his testimony they changed his status from witness to being investigated alongside Rubiales in what is known as “the Brodie Case”.

The French team, led by Kylian Mbappé, Jules Koundé and Marcus Thuram, have bravely denounced France’s lurch towards the far right during its parliamentary elections. Before France’s debut in the tournament, Mbappé, using the third person, declared, “Kylian Mbappé is against extremists”, and urged young French voters to vote against the far-right parties who were “at the gates of power”.

Afterwards, Spain’s goalkeeper Unai Simon was asked about Mbappé's statement. Given an open goal, Simon refused to take a position and criticised Mbappé for his stance in a “leave politics to the politicians” line. Simon’s conservatism called to mind Laura Ingraham, a US broadcaster, who rebuked basketballer LeBron James for “talking politics” in 2018, chiding him: “Keep the political comments to yourself ... Shut up and dribble.”

Perhaps no one embodies conservative Spain more than Dani Carvajal. A take-no-prisoners full back, he plays a similar role in the Spain national team to Stuart Pearce in a bygone era for England. In 2004, as a 12-year-old, Carvajal accompanied the legendary Alfredo di Stéfano in laying the foundation stone at Real Madrid’s new training campus. He scored Real Madrid’s decisive goal against Borussia Dortmund in this year’s Champions League final, and is one of only five footballers in history to win six European Cups.

In 2019, according to Diario Sport, Carvajal invited Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s anti-immigration Vox Party, to watch a game in the VIP Box at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. Real Madrid faced Athletic Bilbao. Even though Abascal grew up in Bilbao, he’s a fan of Real Madrid. In the 1980s, Abascal got attacked by his Basque classmates for wearing a Spain jersey to school. To this day, to wave a Spain flag in the Basque Country or Catalonia identifies a person as being sympathetic to the right.

Carvajal was interviewed earlier in the tournament on Cadena Ser, a Spanish radio station, regarding Mbappé's comments about France’s drift to the far right. Carvajal wouldn’t be drawn, saying as a footballer he preferred staying on the margins, but conceded he wanted Spain to become “a safer country”.

Carvajal follows Luis “Alvise” Pérez on Instagram, a populist online agitator in Spain elected as an MEP to the European Parliament with a mandate to clamp down on crime and immigration. He vows to build a Trumpian “mega prison” outside Madrid, Europe’s largest, to deal with “illegal immigration from north Africa”, saying of the immigrants “we don’t know whether they are rapists”.

The fairy-tale story from this summer’s Euros is the emergence of two young stars in the Spain team, 16-year-old Lamine Yamal and 21-year-old Nico Williams. Both are sons of immigrants who came through north Africa. The pair, whose infectious play on the wings brings to mind Garrincha, have made Spain fall in love with the national football team again for the first time since the golden generation of Xavi and Andrés Iniesta over a decade ago.

Both youngsters play with smiles on their faces. On Monday morning, Spain’s sports newspapers pictured them on the cover pages dancing beside each other after Williams’s scintillating goal in Spain’s 4-1 victory over Georgia.

Lamine Yamal’s father comes from Morocco, his mother from Equatorial Guinea. Williams’s origin story is life-affirming. His parents left Ghana on a truck in the early 1990s for a better life overseas. Halfway to Europe, human traffickers abandoned them after stealing their savings. The couple made it, mostly by foot, to Melilla, an autonomous Spanish city in Morocco, where they were arrested.

Williams’s mother, pregnant at the time with her son, Iñaki, climbed the high, barbed-wire border fence to get into the Spanish enclave. A lawyer advised them to pretend they were from a war-torn country, such as Liberia, to secure political asylum. The ruse worked. They eventually got to northern Spain where Iñaki – who holds the record for the longest consecutive run of appearances in La Liga, stretching over seven years – was born. Eight years later came his brother Nico.

[ Ken Early: Nationalism takes you to peculiar places … especially at Euro 2024 ]

Both Williams brothers play for Athletic Bilbao. Iñaki is an international for Ghana, in homage to his parents; he was already a first-team player with Athletic before he discovered why their father always had trouble walking – his feet got badly burnt from crossing, without food or water, the sands of the Sahara desert.

Stretching back to the 1934 World Cup, an event hijacked by Benito Mussolini, Spain has never knocked out the host nation in tournament finals, their 1-0 loss to Italy in a replay the first of nine such defeats. Most recently, it lost on penalties to Russia at the 2018 World Cup. The Spain of Carvajal and Williams will need a united front, with its players pulling together, to overcome the home team Germany in Stuttgart on Friday evening.