Patri Guijarro has been holidaying in Mallorca, posting pictures of surfboards and palm trees and stalactites. Laia Aleixandri went to Egypt to see the pyramids. Sandra Paños has been going on countryside walks with her dog. Lucía García has been exploring the streets of Manchester. Lola Gallardo went to a music festival. Ainhoa Moraza got her hair done. Leila Ouahabi feasted on a giant plate of mussels and prawns.
The various and lavishly tended Instagram accounts of Spain’s rebel faction are in many ways a portal into a parallel universe. An alternative summer when these international footballers are not playing international football, not braving the winds of Wellington, not encroaching on a World Cup final, perhaps not even watching the World Cup final.
There are no patriotic posts, no good-luck messages or congratulations for their former teammates. In these quiet elisions lie a deafening message: this team may claim to play for a country of 47 million people, but they do not play for me.
In their absence, Spain’s women have reached their first major final. Win or lose against England on Sunday, this has been a transformative tournament for the women’s game in the country, but by no means a unifying one. The scars still run too deep. Too many questions remain unanswered. The careful but fragile show of unity Jorge Vilda and his players have cultivated throughout this tournament will last until about 10.30pm Sydney time. After that, what happens is anyone’s guess.
Vilda is not the sole cause of the split engulfing Spanish football. But the coach has become its lightning rod, its embodiment, its most visible symptom. On one level, this should be his crowning glory after eight years in charge of the national side: a first major trophy within his grasp, despite losing a dozen of his best players to last year’s internal revolt. Yet curiously, the fact that even a depleted Spain are on the verge of triumph does him few favours; to his many detractors it merely suggests that the underlying factor in this success is a ridiculously deep talent pool rather than any particular genius on his part.
The ambivalence towards Vilda goes far deeper than the apparent reluctance of his players to celebrate publicly with him after victories. It goes deeper even than the devastating letter sent to the federation – the RFEF – by 15 Spain players last year, resigning from the national team over a lack of institutional support and poor treatment.
Others, such as Alexia Putellas and Irene Paredes, were said to be tacitly supportive. Although 11 of the 15 declared themselves available for World Cup selection, only Mariona Caldentey, Aitana Bonmatí and Ona Batlle were welcomed back into the fold. The others remain in exile: holidaying, training with their clubs, maintaining the facade that this is all just a normal summer with normal summer things.
This is an antipathy that has been brewing for years, a long-held suspicion within the Spain squad that women’s football was being treated as an afterthought, that their voices were simply not being listened to, and that Vilda was the incarnation of these various strands of grievance.
What these grievances were has never quite been made clear. There were vague reports of Vilda being cold, condescending and controlling, that he would demand that players left their hotel doors unlocked at night so he could inspect their rooms, that their bags would be checked and searched. There were complaints about poor training facilities, poor training sessions, a lack of tactical analysis, long and arduous bus trips, complaints about the lack of action over complaints.
But underpinning all this was a sense that Vilda is simply out of his depth as a coach, that the giant strides made by the big Spanish clubs in recent years have not been matched at international level, that he owes his job not to any special gift but to internal politics and favour. In this context, a return of one major final in eight years, given one of the most spectacular generations of talent seen in women’s football, feels like a squandered inheritance. Meanwhile, that Ángel Vilda, Jorge’s father, is the head of women’s football at the federation is, bluntly put, not a great look.
At its heart, this is not a dispute about shopping bags or bus rides, but power: who gets to wield it, how they keep it and who gets to hold it accountable. You could glimpse this in the RFEF’s blisteringly supercilious response to its protesting players, describing this as a “matter of dignity”, threatening them with huge sanctions and vowing they would not return until “they admit their mistake and ask for forgiveness”. The letter – sent in private – and the names of the players who had sent them were merrily leaked to friendly journalists in the Spanish press.
Perhaps realising their fates were ultimately lashed together, the RFEF has continued to throw its weight behind Vilda. This past week Luis Rubiales, the federation president, described Vilda as “a world-class coach” and rounded on his critics who, he said, did not “love the country” and “only wanted to destroy”.
Without the robust support of Rubiales, Ángel Vilda believes, “Jorge wouldn’t have lasted 15 minutes in the national team”. For his part, Vilda has gone out of his way to praise Rubiales.
The president’s appeal to patriotism was by no means accidental. As Vilda’s side have progressed through, there has been a tendency to cast the remaining rebels as a destructive lunatic fringe bent on sabotaging Spain’s campaign. An appeal to national duty – as well as the opportunity to change Spanish women’s football for ever – is presumably what lured many of the disaffected back into the side. Winning is the strongest adhesive in sport and as long as Spain still have a World Cup to play and win the centre may just hold.
But we are still some distance from closure. Just as defeat by England in last year’s European Championship quarter-finals brought many of Spain’s longstanding fissures to the surface, defeat again here would threaten its uneasy truce. Even a victory could be messy, particularly if the RFEF uses it as an excuse to double down and offer Vilda an extended deal. Record television viewing figures for the semi-final against Sweden suggest the Spanish public is swinging behind the team. It remains to be seen if they are as enthusiastic as the regime running it.
For the players in exile it is too late. For Guijarro and Clàudia Pina and Mapi León, this World Cup has already gone. “It makes me sad, it’s going to piss me off a lot, but the values that I have come first,” León said in March.
The journey is not yet at an end. But in many ways the fight for its legacy has already begun.
