Exactly a week after Spain won their second World Cup, the footballer who scored the goal that secured their first spoke out. On Sunday morning, Andrés Iniesta added his voice to those that had accumulated ever more rapidly over the previous days and hours, starting with the 23 players who had become champions in Sydney and the 12 who had not, ultimately sacrificing the moment of their lives for their principles, the pursuit of improvement. “We can’t tolerate the behaviour which has overshadowed this huge feat,” Iniesta wrote. “I can’t imagine how the players feel seeing that what is being talked about is not the great tournament they produced, or the fantastic football they showed us. It’s over.”
For Luis Rubiales, it is. Or so it seemed: the following morning his mother, Ángeles Béjar, locked herself in the parish church in Motril and announced she was going on a hunger strike, giving this whole saga another surreal twist. By then her son, president of the Spanish football federation (RFEF), had been suspended by Fifa for 90 days. He will not be back. The minister for culture and sport called these Rubiales’s “final hours”. It all started with a World Cup – the man who was less than a month into his presidency sacking Julen Lopetegui two days before Russia 2018, any hope in pieces – and it ended with one, too. Spain were champions this time, but Rubiales is in effect gone, almost as quickly as Lopetegui had been.
