19 August 26
Football In The Plaza
We arrived in Spain just two weeks after the country had won the World Cup. One of the threads we mused upon during the tournament is why it will be generations before the United States men’s team wins the World Cup. This felt evident during the loss of the United States team to Belgium, where the US simply did not have the ball control skills to beat a mid-tier European side. If they had somehow managed to win that match, they would have next met and surely lost to Spain in the quarterfinals, a team whose ball control skills overshadows everyone else’s. The point is that ball handling skills are picked up early on in children’s play, and the culture in the United States simply doesn’t engender this.
In Tivissa we stayed with friends whom we met in 2024 when the family came to Davis and rented the house two doors down from ours because the mother had a postdoc at the university here. They have three children: the two boys are now 12 and 13, and the girl is now 6. While staying in Davis the boys were active in youth sports, both in soccer through the Davis Legacy soccer club and in little league baseball. The soccer coaches in Davis all wanted the middle-aged boy to play on their team, because he scored lots of goals.
We got to witness the kids playing street soccer in Tivissa; in the evenings they would troop on down unsupervised to the plaza next to the church part of which dated back to the 13th century and kick the ball around, attempting to score goals against the wall of the church, the oldest boy in the family being the goalkeeper. There were 6 to 8 kids in total, ages maybe 10 to 13, including a couple of girls, one of whom was a long jump champion across Catalunya for her age group.
I felt like an anthropologist watching these kids. First, because this sort of unsupervised play is not something one has seen in the United States for a couple of generations, though this is facilitated by the small size of Tivissa — it is a village of 1700 people. (We’ve mentioned watching the television show El Foraster about village life in Catalunya before; Tivissa has in fact featured in an episode of this show.) More germane from the sports culture point of view, there is a direct line from this sort of street play by the kids to the dominance of Spain in global soccer, both men’s and women’s sides. The winner of the best young player award at this year’s World Cup, the center-back Pau Cubarsí, now 19, grew up in a village in Girona province in Catalunya of less than 200 people. Learning to kick a ball around is simply what kids do in Catalunya.
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