Spain and Argentina Face Off in FIFA Men’s World Cup Final

It is tempting to frame the final matchup of the FIFA Men’s World Cup between Spain and Argentina primarily as a battle of rival soccer superpowers. But there is a deeper story that connects these two countries. They share a former colonial relationship and a continuing network of social, economic, and cultural ties. That broader context can help illuminate the events on the field between the two teams.

What role does Spain’s heritage play in Argentina’s national identity? How did both countries emerge as soccer superpowers? And what is their political and economic relationship like today?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: What exactly is Argentinia’s national identity comprised of? And how would we locate that in relation to Spain and its cultural influence?

Adam Tooze: I mean, without Spain, no modern Argentina, first and foremost. So, it’s really the Spanish initial landings and the beginning of conquest in 1516 that set Argentina on its path to its modern form. And in terms of statehood, it’s really the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata—which was established in 1776, same time as American independence—which encompasses what will then become Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. That doesn’t last. Internal disputes, Spanish collapse in Europe, a war of independence between 1810 and 1818—and out of all that emerges a former Spanish colony that’s now a republic that’s rapidly expanding into a kind of South American equivalent of the opening of the Western frontier and fueled, as in the north, by a huge influx of migrants, money, and capital from Britain.

That results in this sort of cliche, but kind of funny cliche, about Argentina that it’s Italians who speak Spanish and whose elite think they’re English. And that’s kind of the somewhat catty but telling kind of comment about Argentina’s elite, especially the business elite. And in terms of the population, the Italian population of Argentina is the third-largest Italian population in the world. And just slightly less than two-thirds of Argentinians attribute at least part of their ethnic, racial, family history to Italy—about 62 percent. So, after Italy and Brazil, this is the largest Italian population in the world. And that means there are more people who trace their descent to Italian roots than there are to Spanish roots in modern Argentina.

The Spanish language that is spoken bears the traces of that. So, the Spanish of the imperial period or the viceroyalty period was straightforwardly expat Spanish. But what Argentinians today speak is what’s called Rioplatense Spanish. Spanish of the River Plate. And it’s a version of Spanish that is also commonly spoken in Uruguay and has a large infusion of the Italian language, and, above all, of language from southern Italy. It uses vos in the place of tú, especially accompanying conjugations. It’s a distinct language formation that’s spoken by about 25 to 30 million people and reflects this breakaway, this emergence of an identity which, in the 19th century, after independence from Spain, very self-consciously fashions itself as something new, distinct, and made up of these different influences.

And to add to that, there is the minimal influence that indigeneity seems to exert. Very, very different from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, or even the Central American states. And also, there’s the relatively insignificant role of slavery compared to Brazil, which was the largest slave economy—even larger than the United States—an integral part of the slave trade. So, Argentina is the most European and the least Latin American of the South American states. I’ve heard old and established Argentinian families describe the tragedy of modern Argentinian history as it having become Latin American.

CA: In the 20th century, both of these countries managed to emerge as soccer superpowers. How exactly did that happen?

AT: It’s uneven development at a global level under the hegemony of British capital that explains soccer in these two places. Because like an awful lot of games, sports of the late 19th century—notably those played with balls like rugby, cricket, golf, tennis—they’re British exports of the late 19th century. They’re British elite exports. Like, if Britain is going to do investment or settle down somewhere, the gentlemen—when they’re not working—are going to need something to pass the time. And what they do is they bring their sports with them. And given the hierarchy between Argentina and Spain in the late 19th century, it’s Argentina that soccer comes to first from Britain, from within the British community, in 1867—so very early in the history of modern soccer, modern football.

And the affinity is generally with cricket. So, cricket is the ultimate English gentleman’s game. And cricket clubs would be established, and they would have pitches, fields—big green open spaces. And then the cricket clubs would spawn football teams that would play. And this is the history of Argentinian football from the 1860s onward. So, the Buenos Aires Football Club was founded and was given permission to play on its grounds by the Buenos Aires Cricket Club. Ten years later, in Spain, it’s exactly the same story.

And so, we see a common elite culture of football emerging across all of the British-influenced world. And out of that then emerged the first serious league. So, in the 1890s, football spreads to Catalonia, and we see the formation of Barcelona’s famous soccer history. From Barcelona, it’s Catalonians that take it to Madrid, a point of pride that it goes that way around. And in Argentina, by the early 1900s, you see real white Commonwealth circulation. So, teams from South Africa are coming to Argentina. British soccer teams that are playing in an increasingly intense and professionalized league are coming to Argentina and observe, even at the time, that the standard of play in Uruguay and Argentina is higher than in Europe at the time. Already in the first 50 years of organized soccer, organized football, the Argentinians and the Uruguayans are pulling away. This will be great football legacies in the 20th century.

By the 1920s and ’30s, you begin to see the formation of national teams around the Olympics. And with the advent of the dictatorships, things get very political very fast. So, notoriously, in Francisco Franco’s Spain, Madrid is Franco’s team. And after its big triumphs in the European Athletics Championships of the 1950s, it effectively becomes the sports ambassador of Franco’s Spain. Whereas Barca is called the silent army of Catalan independence. In every game at 17 minutes and 14 seconds, they start chanting this independence chant, because 1714 is the date of a Catalonian uprising. They have a martyred president who was executed by Franco’s side during the civil war. So, the politics of football—all the way down to the present day in Spain—are intense.

CA: Argentina, for much of its history, was more advanced than Spain developmentally. But in the 1970s and ’80s, this begins to shift, with multiple crises in Argentina and rapid economic growth in Spain. This leads to migration from Argentina to Spain and also investments by Spain in Argentina. Is this a kind of post-imperial capitalism with the former colonial power now buying major Argentinian assets?

AT: Yeah, it’s an incredibly fascinating trajectory of these two countries. Because, yes, if Argentina was ahead of Spain by a factor of 2-to-1 at the turn of the century, it remained at that level of distance through to the 1950s, when Spanish growth really takes off and then just hasn’t stopped or didn’t stop until the 2010s. And the consequence is that the GDP per capita measured in purchasing parity suggests that Spain has completely reversed the relationship, so that Spain per capita is now twice as well off as Argentina. Spain sort of surges into a kind of globalized and Europeanized modernity that leaves Argentina, locked in a long series of grinding struggles, trailing in its wake. And, frankly, visiting the two places, you can immediately see it. It’s very striking.

And, yes, the consequence of that is that there has been migration from Latin America to Spain on a really large scale—very large numbers of Venezuelans, folks from the north of Latin America, and indeed Argentinians, who make up about, I think, the fourth-largest group in Spain. One shouldn’t say reverse migration, because many of these people are of Italian extraction. It’s an open secret that, for the Latin American elite, there are two offshore capitals for Latin America—one is Miami and the other one is Madrid—where they spend substantial amounts of the year, and they’ve diversified their portfolios. It’s a little bit like the ultra-wealthy Chinese, who have Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau. These are offshore bases from which to deal with political risk.

Meanwhile, Spain, as a rapidly advancing, increasingly wealthy, and highly sophisticated economy that is the platform for many globalized businesses, is investing in Argentina. In Argentinian terms, it’s large-scale. So, Spain is the second-largest investor in Argentina after the United States. From the Spanish point of view, none of these relationships should be overestimated. The total volume of trade between Spain and Argentina is peanuts in comparison with the overall volume of the Spanish economy, which, if you combine exports and imports, comes to $700-800 billion in the Spanish case. In Argentina, it’s $2.7 billion. So, you know, modest. This is a small annex of Spanish activity. But in Argentina, it is quite controversial.

And what happened in the 2010s is that the then-Peronist government in Spain, so a kind of left-leaning government, nationalized some Spanish investments. And this led to a freezing-over of the relationship between Madrid and Argentina, which was softened somewhat by the neoliberal government of Mauricio Macri, who made a big overture to Spain on the basis of a neoliberal, common agenda of large-scale infrastructure investment to appeal to Spanish capital. But what they needed to do was to convince Spanish money that Argentina was a safe place to invest.

This isn’t a matter of Spain desperate to regain former colonial power. I don’t think that’s a convincing reading. This has got much more to do with simply the overall global expansion of Spanish capital, which is considerable in many infrastructure areas but also in retail and commerce of different types, and Argentina as a potential emerging market venue for that kind of investment.

CA: The current governments under Argentinian President Javier Milei and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez have had a remarkable history of diplomatic disputes, with Milei and Sánchez outright insulting one another, and this led ultimately to a withdrawal of Spain’s ambassador from Argentina in 2024. Has the economic relationship between these countries proved more durable than all this political theater?

AT: In part, this just reflects profoundly different political cultures. Argentina’s is incredibly introverted. It basically runs on the rocket fuel of pro- and contra-Peronism. It’s driven by the intense economic volatility and crisis in that country, which are second to none in the world. Certainly, no society with Argentina’s level of income has been subject to such a roller coaster. Then it produces a really savage, no-holds-barred, winner-takes-all approach to politics. Spain is the poster child of a pluralistic, diverse, and West European political culture that has sustained a progressive majority—very thin, very slight, sometimes not quite a majority, but at least a progressive government for longer than practically anywhere else. It’s not short of its own xenophobes and nationalists. In fact, in some ways, it’s harder than Milei.

When Spain played against France in the quarterfinal, Sánchez had to deal with the fact that highly conservative Spaniards had been making derogatory comments about the number of black players on the French team. And Sánchez immediately shot back and said, you know, the one thing that has to be the loser here is racism, let the best side win. So, Sánchez, you know, his cultural positioning consistently on Palestine, on climate, on China, is pushing back against a kind of neocon and hawkish agenda and walking that line. Against, on the other hand, Milei, who was the wild man of the new right. And so that creates a really powerful and abrasive service.

I just think the crucial thing to emphasize with Argentina and Spain is that Argentina is a very weird, exceptional country with a very peculiar economic development path, which means that it’s not very closely economically integrated with anyone. Whereas Spain is, as I’ve said, really the poster child of European-style integration. And that means that they’re moving in two very different universes. And the connections between them remain at the level of language, though not really at the level of history or politics, and they remain at the level of migration because there’s obvious attractions for folks from more crisis-ridden Latin American countries to perch in Spain. But these are not deep interconnections as one might imagine them. What’s more striking is the degree to which, even speaking Spanish, they are distinct, separate, and divergent countries, inhabiting very different worlds.