The World Cup: a lesson for Catalan politics

After the World Cup hangover, can we, Catalans, draw any useful lessons from this happy outcome in the most important sporting competition on the planet?Spain's victory has pleased me. Nine Catalan players and eight from Barça would be reason enough to support the national team. But the main reason is another: a way of understanding competition has prevailed that also applies to politics.It has been said that the red team won because it was, above all, a team. Faced with teams full of stars – Brazil, England, Portugal or France – Spain did not depend on a single name. Its strength has not been isolated talent, but cohesion. The whole has weighed more than the sum of its parts.It is true. But it is not enough to be a pineapple. It is not enough to have a locker room, nor to invoke great words, nor to confuse intensity with intelligence.Besides a team, to win you need something more prosaic and more decisive: a plan.

In football, in life and in politics, a plan is needed.If there was a pineapple in the final, it was Argentina. You only had to see the players roaring the anthem: it didn't look like a selection, but a tribe of warriors before battle. In the stands, the Argentine chants drowned out the Spanish voices.Argentina was community, ritual and mission. It had liturgy, faith and a messianic figure hovering over the group. It also had excess: seven yellow cards, one red, and the beginning of a final scuffle that did not grow because Spain did not want to enter it.On the other hand, Spain had a low-profile World Cup: substantial, effective, not too flashy, elegant, and brilliant when necessary. Faced with the Argentine frenzy — passion, fury, improvisation — it countered with good sense, control, and a clear idea of play. A plan. If the match had been played in Athens 2,500 years ago, Aristotle would have seen it as a contest between Dionysus and Apollo.This is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable lesson: emotion is essential to start, but insufficient to finish. Emotion can lift a country, ignite a generation, and fill streets, avenues, and squares. But if it is not transformed into method, it is quickly consumed. Epicness without administration ends up becoming noise; a plan without soul mobilizes no one. The grace is in combining them.For too many years, Catalonia has played without a team and without a plan. We have gone out onto the field divided, often at odds, and those of us who wanted to play didn't really know what the winning strategy was. In fact, we didn't even know if there was a strategy at all.Now Catalonia has a very important match pending. The preservation of the welfare state, the improvement of basic services, territorial management, language, culture, and the containment of populisms that have never, anywhere, led to anything good are at stake. Also at stake is the recognition of a national identity that is not monolithic, but rather a diverse and plural national identity in origins, accents, and ways of belonging.The objective should be clear: to make Catalonia a more prosperous, more cohesive, and more self-assured country. And the foundation of this prosperity can be nothing other than the increase of sovereignty. Not out of romanticism, but for effectiveness. A country that does not decide enough about its resources, its infrastructures, its language, or its public policies always plays with a tilted field. The principle of subsidiarity, central to the European project, says something simple: the closer decisions are taken to the citizens, the more likely they are to be correct and applicable.We are clear, then, about the objective: more sovereignty, more powers, more room for action. What we need is an equally clear plan. The priority for Catalan representatives in Parliament and Congress should be to expand self-government, to work discreetly and effectively to improve self-government, without falling into sterile dialectics or the fruitless maximalism of all or nothing. This policy has an old and unepic name: fish in the basket. It consists of minimally knowing the history of Catalonia, knowing Madrid well, and, with this, reading the moment well, measuring forces and counterweights, and tightening the rope without breaking it. It was done in 1931, facilitating Azaña's government; in 1993, with Felipe González; and in 1996, when Aznar signed the Majestic pact with one hand, while with the other he held The Gale, by Pere Gimferrer.The pardons, first, and the amnesty, when it is consummated, will completely close the Process. The majority of citizens, and increasingly more politicians, are already on another screen. The problem is that changing screens doesn't mean having a script. But the game continues. And if Catalonia is capable of forming a good team and playing with a plan, it can go very far and can once again be the admired and envied country it once was.