All great teams eventually meet their nemesis. The all-conquering 1961-62 Yankees, which included Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Yogi Berra, turned into the 1965-67 Yankees, which failed to win eighty games for three seasons in a row. The Chicago Bulls of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen metamorphosed into the Chicago Bulls of Ron Artest and Eddy Curry. Rarely, though, have we witnessed a sporting sunset as sudden and dramatic as the one that has come down on Spain’s soccer team at this year’s World Cup.
After losing to Holland last week by the shocking margin of five goals to one—the worst defeat in history for a reigning World Cup champion—Spain lost again on Wednesday, and was eliminated from the tournament. Chile, who is nobody’s favorite to win the Cup, beat the Spanish handily, going up two goals in the first half and never looking threatened. As the minutes ticked by and the Spanish team members looked increasingly dejected, Steve McManaman, the loquacious Liverpudlian who serves as ESPN’s color man, said, “They deserve to be out.” For once, nobody could argue with Macca’s analysis. After taking a one-goal lead over Holland in last Friday’s match, Spain allowed seven goals, scored none, and committed the sorts of errors, all over the pitch, that would have embarrassed a much lesser team.
When they flew to Brazil, the Spanish players were looking to win their fourth major tournament in a row. In addition to emerging victorious from the 2010 World Cup, which was held in South Africa, Spain won the UEFA European Championship, the Continent’s mini-version of the World Cup, in both 2008 and 2012. Another triumph in Brazil would have strengthened its claim to be the greatest national team ever to play the people’s game.
It wasn’t just its superlative record that set the Spanish team apart; it was the manner of its victories. In its six years of global supremacy, it perfected an innovative way of playing the game, known as tiki-taka, which has players string together a series of rapid, short passes, many of them on first touch, denying their opponents the ball for long periods and, ultimately, wearing them down.
Unlike previous powerhouses, such as the German teams of the nineteen-seventies and today, the Spanish players weren’t particularly fleet and strong, nor did they posses a talismanic world beater—a Pelé, a Maradona, or a Cruyff. But that was part of what made the team so special: it was greater than the sum of its parts. Its best players—Xavi Hernandez, Andrés Iniesta, David Villa, David Silva—were all short, slight, and possessed of a deft touch. Together, they produced amazingly intricate ball movements that, all too often, bamboozled their opponents, and left them chasing shadows. Taken to its limits, tiki-taka resembled a group exercise in geometric pattern-making. Some soccer managers and writers rebelled against it, claiming that it was sterile. Others loved its precision and fluidity. (The patterns went in all directions.) But nobody could argue with its success—until recently, that is.
In the 2013 semi-finals of the Champions League, the top competition for European clubs, Bayern Munich, of Germany, found a way to defeat Barcelona, the Spanish team that developed tiki-taka and is home to many of the players on the national squad. By pressing Barça’s players every time they received the ball and smothering the midfield, Bayern, over two games, upset the Spanish club’s rhythm and ended up thumping them by an aggregate score of seven to nil.
Was that an omen of dreadful events to come? As Spain cruised through the qualifying stages for this year’s World Cup, it seemed premature to say as much. In last year’s Confederations Cup, a dress rehearsal for this year’s tournament, the team made it to the final, where it lost to the hosts Brazil. That didn’t augur well for repeating as world champions, but few fans or analysts foresaw an exit in the first round, and nobody—absolutely nobody—predicted this debacle.
What went wrong? It is tempting to put it down to the passage of time and the aging process. Soccer is a gruelling sport, and most players peak in their late twenties. Xavi is thirty-four; Iniesta is thirty; Villa, who recently signed for New York City F.C., one of the latest additions to Major League Soccer, is thirty-two and didn’t make this year’s World Cup starting eleven. It was the end of a generation, Roberto Martinez, the Spanish manager of Everton, said after watching the labored performance against Chile. “Spain doesn’t have the energy to play at that level.”
Perhaps not, but bad tactics may also have played a role. In picking the teams to play Holland and Chile, Vicente del Bosque, Spain’s beloved manager—beloved until now, that is—edged away from the tactics that had prevailed for so long. In the final of the Euro 2012 tournament, del Bosque went without a regular striker, playing the so-called “false nine” formation, which is an extreme version of tiki-taka. His team defeated Italy, 4-0. For Brazil, however, del Bosque changed tack. Against Holland, he picked an orthodox center forward, Diego Costa, who turned out to be a dud. Needing a win against Chile, he kept Costa in his lineup and omitted Xavi, hitherto the linchpin of the team. It was as if the New York Philharmonic, after one poor show, had canned its veteran concertmaster.
But del Bosque shouldn’t shoulder all the blame, or, indeed, the majority of it. What happened to Spain went beyond the aging process, questionable tactics, and individual failings. In the first half against Holland, the team took a one-goal lead, and almost added another, courtesy of Silva. It looked to be in control. Then, just a minute before the half-time break, Robin van Persie, Holland’s center forward, created a goal out of nothing with a wonderful diving header.
After that equalizer, something changed. In the second half, Spain suffered an unprecedented physical and mental breakdown. They let in four goals, two of them thanks to howling errors by their goalkeeper and captain, Iker Casillas. As the game proceeded and the goal tally mounted, you could see the Spanish players’ confidence draining away. Like Mike Tyson on that night in Tokyo when Buster Douglas dropped him to the canvas for the first time in his career, Spain’s mystique, and its aura of invincibility, had gone.
In Wednesday’s match, Chile exploited Spain’s obvious nervousness, tackling aggressively and taking advantage of yet another goalkeeping error from Casillas. Once they were down two to zip, the Spaniards never looked like they were coming back to win, and, after a meaningless game on Monday against Australia, which has also been eliminated, they will be on their way home. It’s a sad way for what sportswriters like to refer to as “a dynasty” to end. But before the Spanish tiki-taka men return back to Catalonia and Madrid, we should pause and bid them farewell, or, rather, adios. Soccer will not soon see their likes again.
Photograph by Metin Pala/Anadolu Agency/Getty.
