World Cup 2010: How a love of Spain can make for a sterile affairThe success of Spain's made-for-television style shows how far football has moved from its occasionally brutal roots
Spain will probably win the World Cup. This seems likely as they are the most predictable of all brilliantly skilled football teams. When Spain perform as they usually do – outside of the statistically freakish opening loss to Switzerland – it is tempting to say no other top team have ever come so close to being unbeatable, in the sense that winning a football match is a function of having the ball now and then and being allowed to kick it towards your opponents' goal.
Spain have kept the ball phenomenally well. And they have been the best team in other ways. Their defence are exceptional. They work and press like champions. This is all unarguable; Spain would be deserving world champions. So why the sense of slight unease?
Spain have not been "found out" in this World Cup as some predicted – and hoped – they might. They have been courageous and hearteningly true to their style. But they do still have limitations, albeit not apparently technical ones.
There is a gnawing sense of affection-deficit, of a shallowness to the emotional peaks – relative to their excellence as performers – that this Spain team will induce in anyone other than the partisan. Spain will treat you to peerless moments of collective artisanship; but they may also leave you feeling a bit cold.
The notion that Spain are a boring team has even been cautiously floated, the tedium induced by a sideways-angled possession-neurosis. It would seem more accurate to say – as Xavi did after the semi-final defeat of Germany – that the combination of Spain's style and their induced counter measures (deep defence, counterattack) can make for boring matches.
But still the feeling persists that this is an oddly frictionless excellence; that Spain play a kind of platinum-selling dinner party football – Coldplay Football – that is clearly and undeniably high spec, but also devoid of jarringly revelatory spikes and twists. Playing against Spain must feel a little like playing a chess computer: strangled, impotent, you gawp helplessly at its robotic grace.
This is to diminish unfairly the technical superiority – and unrelenting hard graft – of the Spanish players. But it is still worthy of examination, if only because Spain's peculiar strain of excellence is in part a reaction to outside forces. This is a hyper-modern style. It stands right at the frontier of what 20 years of fine macro-engineering by the game's twin governing bodies – Fifa and television – has decreed football is now going to be.
It is important to note that football has changed beyond recognition over this period. The element of concussive physicality has been decisively muted. This is no longer a violent contact sport. Watch a little of even the 1990 World Cup and you keep wondering where all the free-kicks are; how the players keep getting away with all that leaning and chopping and barging.
For more than a century this was the essential appeal of the game: moments of beauty gouged out of something unyielding and often gruesome. But you trusted entirely these rare moments of triumphant self-expression: every jink and turn by Diego Maradona at the 1986 World Cup was hard-won,
brutally paid for and born out of absolute courage and commitment.
This was also unsustainable. The rule changes to punish dangerous play might have saved, not just Maradona's shins, but the late stages of his career. The clamping down on overly-physical play –
what would have been a legitimate test of strength is now a foul; what would have been a foul is a yellow or red card – was designed to encourage a generation of Maradonas.
Instead, we have something else. We have Spain, the most obvious headline product of the new rules. They have freedom to play as they do. The rules of the game will protect them. The definition of what is a "foul" now extends to anything that prevents expression on the ball, rather than anything dangerous or overly strong-arm. Tactically, Spain have grasped this better than anyone else. Technically, they have the players to exploit it.
The upside of this is we get to admire their ability to manoeuvre the ball. The downside is a sense of a diminishing of the game's more gut-wrenching highs and lows, a loss of wild, 360-degree extremity. Plus, rules that were designed to promote the influence of individual skill by star players have had the opposite effect: expert group defence has replaced the old-style notion of "man-marking" (a classic man-marker would be sent off within three or four minutes). So teams will neutralise Lionel Messi by a kind of revolving collective hustle; narrowly within the rules, but creating above all a sense of constipation.
The main problem, though, is that Spain's displays of extreme technical ability are cheapened. It is hard to trust entirely their moments of excellence. The Dutch team of the 1970s was challenged by, and forced to navigate, the overriding physicality of the times. Pelé was first and foremost a great rippling bull of a man, both the most skilful and the most brutally treated player on the field.
The challenge for Spain is more straightforward; it involves simply imposing superior technique and movement, cradled within the righteous embrace of the referee. This is hardly their fault; but it is no surprise some might find it less than compelling.
In the end perhaps it all comes down to modes of consumption. Spain's is a televisual style, the evolutionary fruit of 20 years of rule-tinkering and spectacle-promotion. Football's physicality, the style that still endures in the lower leagues in England, only really makes sense in the flesh. The thrilling audible crunch of physical collision does not translate to the screen.
So the game's law-makers, and promoters, have tried to give us something else, geared towards their most lucrative revenue stream. Spain demonstrate that peerless technical excellence will thrive under these conditions, and this is clearly a good thing.
But it will occasionally make for paradoxically tedious watching, with matches (outside of a mouthwatering hypothetical Spain v Spain showdown) lassoed by spoiling tactics. More than this there is a sense that the emotional notes are perhaps muted, that we crave something more flawed, a more rugged and potholed contest, less exactingly marshalled and stewarded.
We might yet get it. Perhaps this is simply a phase in Spain's rise. The current style is in many ways an anxious style, driven by fear of conceding possession. This is after all Spain's first World Cup final. If they win it, as most think they will, we might yet get to see Spain 2.0: a more direct, less mannered Spain. And one it is also a little easier to love with a sense of abandon.
. Like the benitez/lippi joke too 
