A slip of the foot or a trolley-ride by Arcadi Espada?

An opinion piece by Arcadi Espada in El Mundo is being ridiculed by some. It states that “the magnitude of Spanish disappointment in the World Cup requires more than tactical analysis”, that “serious teams do not smile while the anthem plays, but when they collect the cup”, that “the outcome cannot surprise those who observe the moral climate of the country” and that “the elimination leaves urgent lessons for 2030”. It might seem, of course, that the columnist prepared the text days in advance, awaiting the Spanish defeat, and that a lack of filters and misfortune caused it to be published to the great ridicule of the journalist and the media. Some illustrious journalists and people from the profession are taking advantage of this.

This is not a sauce I intend to taste, however. Espada would have had to live under a very, very large rock for the last 96 hours not to learn of the Spanish team's victory. The article looks very much like a parody of how a different outcome – Ferran Torres' shot crashing into the goalkeeper's gloves, penalties going in Argentina's favor – would have generated countless articles bitterly analyzing the entire country based on the unpredictable on-field performance of about twenty young athletes. After all, we are talking about a columnist who, one day, just to provoke, published that Javier Cercas had been arrested in a raid on a brothel. Espada is – or wants to be – a fundamentalist of factuality. If he then railed against the idea of literary truth that sometimes infiltrates journalism, the World Cup article can be seen as a denunciation of those who are categorical based on the chance of a sports result. For me, the interesting debate is not whether it is a blunder or provocation: it is whether the fact that the irony is not grasped is a goal in the wrong or right net.