To win a World Cup, everything usually has to be perfect. The manager and the players have to exist in harmony. The squad has to be in delicate balance: between talent and tenacity, youth and experience, self-belief and self-control. A team needs momentum, and good fortune, and unity. Spain, in the year preceding this year’s Women’s World Cup, had none of those things.
The squad was in a state of open revolt. More than half the team had walked away, withdrawing their labor in protest at their treatment not only by executives of the Spanish soccer federation but also by their coach, Jorge Vilda. The country’s great star, the leading light of its golden generation, had watched it all from the sideline, desperately willing her anterior cruciate ligament to heal.
Even when a truce was found, a cadre of the mutineers restored to the team’s ranks, it was an uneasy one. The peace was born of convenience, rather than resolution. The squad was still cleaved by rifts and schisms and cliques. Winning a tournament is a matter of marginal gains, of fine details. Spain had none of them. In its circumstances, it seemed simply not possible for it to become world champion.
And yet, and yet, at the end of the biggest, widest, broadest, deepest Women’s World Cup, it was Spain’s players…
