A few acknowledgments for Spain's associative football

Spain would not play associative football had Barcelona not played it for the last two decades with great success.




And Barcelona would not play it had Johan Cruyff in the 1990s not imposed it as the compulsory style for all divisions of Barcelona, from little kids to grown up pros. Cruyff probably also owes a lot to his former coach, Rinus Mitchel.




The last two brilliant years of Guardiola as a Barcelona coach have also been critical to persuade Del Bosque that this style that he is not so fond of can be just as effective, if not more effective, than any other approach.

Barcelona plays with fantastic footballers bred in town in the younger divisions, such as Valdés, Piqué, Puyol, Xavi, Busquets, Iniesta, Messi, Pedro or Bojan. As any other private and wealthy club, Barcelona can also afford to fill in the remaining possitions with players tha would fit the team style, such as Márquez, Alves, Yaya Touré, Keita, Henry, and Ibrahimovic...

A general acknowledgment is also due to Latin American football, in particular, Brazilian football. From Mexico to Patagonia, all Latin America speaks a smiliar football language--a big appreciation for a very skilfull, associative, and aesthetic way of playing. Thousands of Latin American players have played in the Spanish professional league over the years. Besides, Spain feels very strongly emotionally and culturally connected to Latin America. The Spanish football taste has always been influenced by this connection.

Spain as a national team only played in this combinative style very recently, under the coaching of Luis Aragonés. In the history of Spanish coaching, Aragonés is probably one of the most pragmatic and least style oriented of all coaches. A lover of good defense strategy, steal and run, he was well known for critizicing players who would try to play "pretty", as opposed to "playing well". Who would have thought that he would end up implementing the most beautiful style Spain ever played!

After two years of coaching the Spanish national team without any major success, Aragonés slowly but surely veered towards playing with his best players all at once, without sparing a single one on the bench. The problem was that they all shared a very similar profile: midfielder, small, skillful, associative, imaginative, not very muscular...

Acknowledging and embracing the abundance of this type of player in Spain was not an easy task. National coaches in the past, including Aragonés himself, had shared a common fear: if Spain plays with all the talented guys at once, it may get abused by the muscle power of all other teams. All coaches in the past had chosen to "balance" the national team by sitting down some of the best players on the bech and introducing some muscle instead. This led to decades of a confusing style, at times muscular, at times skillful, but never fully either one.

Luis Aragonés was the first coach to come to the conclusion that the problem of Spain in the past had been one of split-personality: it had aspired to play beautiful football but never played its best players all at once; it bred talent but played with muscle. For the first time in the history of the Spanish team, Aragonés dared to play all the talented little people together, and to make them play the style that fits them best, a style that no Aragonés team in his long coaching career had ever played before-combinative football.

Thank you, Luis, for daring. Thank you, Johan and Barcelona, for your vision. Thank you Rinus, for opening the way.