The Spanish Victory: A Larger Lesson?

In a word: no.

Nigel de Jong is not a footballer with a sterling reputation for fair play, and this is an example of a team (mistakenly) discounting its own talent by using dirty fouling in order to defeat a team that’s considered more technically gifted. Your analysis would only have a chance at working if 1) This kind of thing didn’t happen in hundreds of thousands of matches around the world and 2) if this match involved the USA in some way (and even then, I’d have to question it).

It’s just sports, after all.

On a side note not really having to do with this Bag post, I’m getting disturbed by the weird lefty hand-wringing about what this event means in the USA. While international soccer is a hotbed of political allegory, it would really help the credibility of any argument to actually include some basic details about the game and the teams instead of launching straight into the politics unfettered by context. Oftentimes, international soccer is way too complicated to settle into predictable ideological memes.

More to the point is the romantic theme of Spanish unity after this victory from various sports journalists, discounting/ignoring the fact that Catalan newspapers chose instead to feature independence protests on their front pages (with giant pictures of their flag) rather than the victory of “Team Spain” in the World Cup.