The Argentina-Spain Final

Continuing my series about psycho-social aspects of World Cup football

1.

But first; about last night.

The present Argentine side consistently receives a psychological boost from going behind. They glimpse the abyss and become more dangerous, not less. They simply refuse to lose. Hatred of defeat, more than the joy of victory, has driven Argentine football for as long as I can remember, and this team has that instinct in spades. As well as Messi and a lot of very good footballers. No team could have coped with the whirlwind of skill, intensity and emotion unleashed by Gordon’s goal.

2.

Once again there was a torrent of online abuse directed at Argentina, mainly, but by no means exclusively, from English people. Some of it was the normal anger that follows defeat. But the flood of “Argentines are racists”, “cheats”, “Nazi lovers”, “child abusers” and so on went far beyond football.

3.

Now some thoughts on the background to Sunday’s final.

Argentines generally feel very Argentine, even if they are the children of recent immigrants. Argentina is one of those countries whose civic identity rapidly absorbs immigrants. Within a generation at most, ancestry usually becomes a family story rather than an alternative nationality. It doesn’t matter whether their parents, grandparents or more distant ancestors came from Okinawa, Oslo or Oviedo.

So, forget about Argentina having any fraternal feeling with Spain because of the shared language and because many Argentines have fairly recent Spanish ancestors. You can meet Argentines with nicknames like “el vasco” or “el gallego”; you won’t find anyone known to his friends as “el español”.

4.

There are a lot of Argentine immigrants in Spain and they tend to think of themselves as more flexible and streetwise than the locals. Even those without an EU passport rarely see themselves as people who have been “given an opportunity”. They think they’re bringing something to Spain as much as Spain is giving something to them.

The Argentine stereotype of Spaniards, who they tend to refer to as “gallegos” after the region that sent a lot of immigrants to the River Plate, is one of mild, friendly condescension: competent, decent people, but a little slower, less imaginative and easier to outwit than themselves.

On Sunday the Argentine team’ll either refuse to lose to people they subconsciously regard as their inferiors, or they’ll lose precisely because they subconsciously regard them as inferiors. I don’t know which is more likely.

I’d be more worried about whether they’ll be able to recover from the psychological high of beating the English. They may be some underlying feeling of having already won their personal World Cup

5.

Spain is a much less homogeneous country than Argentina. National and regional identities overlap in ways that make generalisations hazardous. Bear in mind that my thoughts are based on having lived in Barcelona since 2015.

Among the educated and professional classes here I think there’s a feeling that there are too many Argentines, that they are too sure of themselves, that they don’t respect the Catalan language and culture and they don’t even speak proper Spanish. My wife works with Catalan professionals and in the presence of colleagues she “standardises” her grammar and pronunciation to avoid having to endure their titters and “only trying to help” corrections.

None of this is because Argentines feel pro-Spanish or anti-Catalan, it’s more that they feel that those tensions are simply irrelevant to them.

Of course I generalise. The left’s candidate for Barcelona mayor next year is Gerardo Pisarello. He arrived here as a strapping thirty year old but now, tragicomically, describes himself as a Catalan of Argentine origin.

Messi is the opposite case. He has lived most of his adult life in Barcelona and, as far as anyone knows, doesn’t speak a word of Catalan, and speaks Spanish with the same accent and grammar as when he left Rosario aged twelve, the sort of ease my wife doesn’t get to enjoy at work. Fame and wealth bought him an exemption that ordinary Argentines here don’t get.

My heart will be with Argentina and Messi. But if Spain win, I hope I’ll have watched two countries I know well producing a fascinating football match and another chapter in a relationship that’s more complicated than it looks on the surface