The imperfect 0-0
The Italian coach of the 1950s, Annibale Frossi, once said, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to the journalist and writer Gianni Brera, that the perfect game of football would finish 0-0. This was because Frossi believed it would represent “an expression of the balance between attack and defence.” In New Jersey last Sunday, the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina ended 0-0 after 90 minutes, needing a late extra-time winner from Ferran Torres to settle the tie. If one reads the scorecard and nothing more, one might think Frossi stands vindicated. But the score scarcely reveals the full picture.
There is a second kind of perfect 0-0 too, one which, as Michael Cox has argued, might entail two teams straining to score for 90 minutes, but somehow failing to do so, partly perhaps due to the goalkeepers and defenders on show, and maybe even owing to poor finishing. Such a game might be seen as perfect for the richness and abundance it offers even if not for its equilibrium.
But Sunday’s final simply did not fit into either category. There was no exquisite equilibrium on display. Nor was there any balance between attack and defence. The game was also largely devoid of any manifest excitement. Instead, it involved one team, Spain, playing football of rare coherence and beauty — deservedly bringing it triumph — and the other, Argentina, playing simply to survive, to hang on with a view to somehow finding their way through.
Consider some of the bare statistics. Spain took twenty shots, while Argentina did not register a single shot on target, in more than 120 minutes of play, including extra time. The latter’s goalkeeper, Emiliano Martinez, made eleven saves, a record for a final. Each save was greeted as though it were part of the plan. It became clear as the match wore on that this wasn’t a case of Argentina weathering a storm while looking for a counter, but this was all their plan entailed. They were playing to take the game to a shootout, where, they felt, their odds would improve several-fold. This was no snarling catenaccio, of the kind that Frossi and Brera might have romanticised, where the defence works to install a door-bolt. This was something altogether more cynical, something akin to an anti-football, where a team was banking on getting through the entirety of the game with the hope of ultimately winning it on the flip of a coin.
Credit then to Spain. They showed us the infinite virtues of a pass and move style that is built both on supreme technique and, even more importantly, patience. Their midfield worked like clockwork throughout, winning the ball back, and recycling it as efficiently as possible between themselves. At the heart of it all was Rodrigo Hernandez Cascante, or simply Rodri, the tournament’s best player. He acted both as a human metronome and as a conductor on the pitch. Together first with Fabian Ruiz and later with Pedri, he kept the ball churning from one side to another, constantly striving to find the best way through, while also shutting down the space whenever the ball was lost. This was pure control on display, suffocating for the opposition. Even if the game was otherwise short on palpable excitement, the authority and mastery that Spain demonstrated still made for compelling viewing.
When Argentina went down to 10 men just before the full-time whistle went, after their midfielder Enzo Fernandez lost his head, as is sometimes his wont, Spain assumed even greater control. The shootout soon loomed, but Torres, who had been sent in from the bench, found himself in space and hammered the ball under Martinez’s crossbar from eight yards out. One of the more dominant final performances in memory got the only goal it needed, and the World Cup got the winner it deserved.
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Spain’s approach doesn’t merely reflect a style of football. It’s something larger, more like an ethos or a system of belief, one imported into the country by the great Dutchman Johan Cruyff. The story is well documented. There was enormous resistance before Cruyff first arrived in Barcelona as a player in 1973. The transfer fee was so large that the Spanish state wouldn’t countenance it. The club finally brought him into the country by registering him officially as a piece of agricultural machinery. Some tiller he proved. As a player at Barcelona, he won only a solitary league title, but he altered the club’s conception of what success ought to mean. Winning was no longer the sole aim. What also mattered was playing football in a certain manner, instilling in the style of play a core idea about space.
“Pythagoras in boots” was how The Times’ David Miller described Cruyff, who refashioned how we today understand the game’s geometry. The Dutch teams which revolved around him, under Rinus Michels at Ajax and with the national team of 1974, treated the dimensions of a football pitch as elastic, something that a team could enlarge when in possession of the ball, and shrink when the ball was lost, squeezing the opponent into nothingness. Football in many ways has always been about space. But the Dutch and Cruyff made it conscious. When Barcelona began to dominate European football under Pep Guardiola in the late 2000s, their team came to represent something of a masterpiece, the fullest expression of Cruyff’s spatial theories. But what has since happened is a further expansion, with those theories growing into a larger Spanish model.
That too, in many ways, was Cruyff’s doing. His greatest legacy in Barcelona wasn’t the Dream Team he built as its coach in the early 1990s, or the four consecutive league titles they won, or even the European Cup of 1992. It was La Masia, the academy he urged the club to build, modelled after Ajax, as early as 1979, where apprentices could be trained to think in terms of space and put the collective above the singular. Or as Simon Kuper memorably put it, “the university of the pass.”
The Spain that won everything between 2008 and 2012, including the country’s first World Cup in 2010, was built on a La Masia spine, on Xavi, Iniesta and Busquets, on a unit that elevated the retention of the ball into high art. The Spain that won on Sunday doesn’t have the same star power, but it is that team’s direct descendant. The eleven players on the pitch do not operate as individuals—even if some of them are as talented as the 19-year-old Lamine Yamal is—but as a unit. Luis de la Fuente, their manager, has imbibed the Cruyffian methods, working first in youth development, with the Under-19 and Under-21 teams, before he was promoted as national team coach. Through those levels, the footballing philosophy has remained the same: an emphasis on the collective.
There are, of course, players of rare individual brilliance who shine through the system. Spain didn’t have to rely on Yamal alone, but his abilities on the pitch meant that every time he drew defenders to him, space opened for others to exploit. The model is also exemplified by the team’s use of its central defenders, in particular Barcelona’s Pau Cubarsi, also 19. Slight in build, Cubarsi defends in a way that Cruyff would have approved. He is a defender who thinks like a play-maker. In building from the back, Cubarsi is capable of the finest of line-breaking passes, either into Spain’s midfield or sometimes even into their number 10, Dani Olmo. Spain played nine matches at the World Cup and conceded a solitary goal. This wasn’t a product of vintage, backs-to-the-wall defending. It was a product of controlling space, and playing constantly on the front foot, with the ball at their feet.
But here is the irony. Lionel Messi, himself a graduate of La Masia, having arrived in Barcelona at thirteen, was schooled in the same ideas of space and technique that Spain's players imbibe as children. On Sunday, at 39, in what was in all likelihood his final World Cup match, he stood on the other side, seeking a second title. But for long stretches, he was reduced to being a mere spectator, spending almost the entirety of the match on the fringes of the game. In sharp contrast to Spain, Argentina’s tactics were modelled with a view to liberating Messi and Messi alone. For so much of the World Cup it worked, but that’s because others unlike Spain, didn’t find the answer to one of the hardest questions in football: how do you stop Messi? The answer: keep the ball.
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Much as Spain were worthy winners, the World Cup was in so many ways about more than just the football. Even before a ball had been kicked, the Somali referee Omar Artan was denied entry into the U.S. FIFA which had asserted that “everyone will be welcome” couldn’t’ manage to get one of its own appointees in. Iran’s players, over the course of the tournament, were treated as a security problem that needed managing. They were granted limited permits, allowed into the county only for match-days, and sent back to Tijuana, Mexico, to their training camp, granting them little time in the way of recovery.
Against this backdrop, as Dave Zirin wrote in The Nation, an Argentina victory may well have been seen as a victory for Javier Milei, a favourite of the international hard right. Instead, it offered a fillip for Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, among the few European leaders who have refused to toe Washington’s line. Sport doesn’t always reward the nice guys. But here it perhaps did.
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Years ago, writing about complaints over Pete Sampras being too boring, the sportswriter Simon Barnes remarked that if you find excellence boring, then sport is not for you. That line was often on my mind this past month, when watching Spain. There may have been a barren feeling about how the final played out, but there was nothing barren about Spain. There was always a sense of sangfroid about their football— play the way you’ve been taught to play, and the winner will, at some point, arrive.
An idea birthed half a century ago in the country, through Cruyff’s import, has now, perhaps, reached its apotheosis. Frossi was wrong about the perfect game. Argentina certainly proved that his sacred scoreline could be reached through the unholiest of means. But he was right about one thing. Football at its best contains an equilibrium, only that this equilibrium is between the one and the many, between the self and the system.