Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
You might suspect metropolitan snobs of at best half-watching the summer football, what with its mono-national squads, its uneven standards. You might think it was on in the background as we pined for the globalised excellence of the club game. Wrong. I was as hurt as the next man when Gavin Southgate and the Two Lions fell short. Well done, France.
Besides, if there was just a trace of inattention, it enabled one to see the wider story. Which is? Well, isn’t the Spanish football team that nation’s 21st century in miniature? La Roja had one major title to its name at the turn of the millennium. It now has five: the fruits of a coaching revolution that still rolls. (The trophies don’t capture Spain’s intellectual hold on the sport.)
This arc lines up with that of Spanish cuisine, which was liked well enough in 2000 but then moved to the avant garde of the avant garde, with Ferran Adrià as the front-most troop.
Not long ago Madrid was Vienna-like in its ossification. It might now be Europe’s most vaunted city after London and Paris, and the world’s best that isn’t on or near a coast. The boom there stems from what? Regional tax incentives, to a degree, but also an openness to those modernisms — architectural, gastronomic — that first tend to stir in littoral Spain. A 2019 column in The Economist contrasted the space-age texture of parts of urban Spain with “peeling” Italian cities. There was no need to stop at Italy.
If the theme here is the ultra-modern, what are the costs of it? How might a nation get a nasty gash from its own cutting edge? No doubt, the splurge of investment a generation ago left behind some follies. It wasn’t all dolphin-nosed fast trains and Frank Gehry wonder-works. Public debt, not unrelatedly, is high. And success turns out to be its own punishment. Spain is too attractive to the outside world, hence the spread of such anti-tourist graffiti as antes esta era mi casa (“this used to be my house”) and a tomar por culo de aquí (a phrase that I can’t seem to locate in my collected Cervantes).
Still, the point here isn’t Spain’s greatness or otherwise. It is the direction of travel versus its peers. Of all the old European powers, Spain alone has had a good century. Britain, the biggest sinker, counts the 2008 financial crash and a now-unpopular Brexit as the main tide marks in a gentle coming-down in the world. Italian growth for most of the time since 2000 is a flat-ish line. (On one IMF measure, Spain became richer in 2017.) Germans lived in the west’s paragon nation a decade ago and now, as Nord Stream 2 rusts in the Baltic deep, perhaps the west’s most chastened. France, at least, can spin a tale of arrested decline. But not of much more than that.
All these places face the same challenge: how do countries past their prime, some with vast and lost empires, face the future? Spain has been the least squeamish in doing it.
The others will object that it started from a lower base. Spain didn’t join the EU until 1986. Franco is a living memory. There is nothing like being screened from modernity to whet one’s taste for it. But that might have worked the other way. Without practice at this stuff, a nation’s sudden ingestion of the new might have caused more drama (1990s Russia is the warning).
Either way, a stuck Britain should consult Spain for lessons. And doing so will mean getting over a historic blind spot. In Kenneth Clark’s 13-episode TV series Civilisation, the great man — that isn’t meant archly — all but ignores the land of Velázquez and Goya, and this despite a general keenness to apprise viewers of the splendours of the Catholic Church. Watteau, for heaven’s sake, gets more air time.
This is consistent with the British elite’s orientation towards France, Germany and Italy as the more proper tutors. It has something to do with class prejudice, less against Spain itself than against the Brits who make the Costa Blanca rather than Provence or Umbria the site of their second lives. But it will have to go. On several fronts, Spain is the demoted European power from which Britain could learn most. Next month, I take my seat for another season at the Emirates Stadium. The coach is Basque, of course.
Email Janan at [email protected]
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen