Watching the exuberant celebrations in Spain after its footballers had won the World Cup final made me think. The best team won, of course. Come on, Holland tarnished a heritage of Total Football and Johan Cruyff and all that by going for a physical contest. (Steady on, this is the business section – not sport).
And Spain deserve their moment; for all our whingeing about burying “44 years of hurt” – as national sports pages described the hiatus since 1966 – neither Spain nor Holland had ever won the World Cup before.
What about their even longer years of hurt?
But the real point here is not to sweat out the last drop of World Cup fever, but ask what that win can do for Spain and an economy even deeper in the mire than ours.
As with our football, we often dwell on our own woes without actually seeing that others might be worse off and, to compound Spanish difficulties, they are more dependant economically on we Brits through tourism and food exports than we are on them.
Belt-tightening here has consequences on the other side of the Bay of Biscay.
Of course it’s hard to quantify what “some football match” can do for a nation’s balance sheet, but I suspect the feel-good factor injected by that win in South Africa is worth a multi-billion euro handout from the European Union.
Which makes you wonder what even a good cup run might have done for another football-mad nation – England.
As it is, rather like the national team’s
coast through the qualifiers, we seemed to take the uncertainty of the General Election build-up and the austerity of the recent Budget in our stride, only for people to despair at the early demise of a bunch of overpaid footballers allegedly overawed by the country’s desperation to, yes, end those 44 years of hurt.
I’m sure some business people will say, “What’s football got to do with my balance sheet?” or even “What’s football?” but it’s about confidence from the top to the bottom of companies and the spending that comes from consumer optimism.
So don’t relax your guard and do take another look at employee morale; there’s little to look forward to until Christmas and far too much talk about a double-dip recession.
Don’t lose on penalties now.