The Spanish are racking up trophies yet half of under-25s are unemployed. Can the country only rouse itself in sports?
Spain woke up this morning groggy with euphoria as the national football team made history by winning three international competitions in a row when they beat Italy in the Euro 2012 final and proved that the Italians are not in their class when it comes to kicking a ball.
The victorious team arrived back in Madrid on Monday to meet King Juan Carlos and parade through the capital in an open-top bus to celebrate their team's crushing 4-0 victory in Kiev.
But the euphoria was dampened somewhat by the latest Eurostat figures showing that youth unemployment continues to rise, with 52.1% of the under-25s officially out of work compared to 7.9% for the same age group in Germany. To excel at any sport demands dedication, discipline and hard work, traits that northern Europeans claim are absent in a country where they say "now" means "later" and mañana means "never" or, at the very least, "not now".
Is it really the case that the under-achieving Spaniards can only rouse themselves when it comes to sport? It's not only football that Spain excels at. They are the reigning European basketball champions and took the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics. They are the current champions in all three classes of the world motorcycle championships, while two-time world champion Fernando Alonso currently leads the field in Formula One.
Spanish cyclists have won the Tour de France in nine out of the past 20 years, including Miguel Indurain's five in a row in the 1990s. Rafa Nadal may have flopped at Wimbledon this year but he's still the world No 2 and Spanish men occupy five of the top 20 places in the official tennis rankings. Spain also excels at lesser-known sports, such as handball. Meanwhile, Barcelona kiteboarding star Gisela Pulido has been world freestyle champion for the past three years and the women's synchronised swimming team took silver in Beijing.
But unfortunately not all of Spain's unemployed youth can become sports stars. They need sustainable employment and today's data showing the worst prospects for Spain's manufacturing sector for three years does not augur well for more jobs in that crucial sector.
However, Angels Valls, professor of people and organisation management at ESADE business school, says that, bad as they are, the youth unemployment statistics mask the true problem, which is that the bulk of the unemployed are middle-aged men who lost their jobs in the construction industry and are unlikely to be able to keep up with their pension contributions. "Young people dropped out of school during the boom and their education level is very low," she said, adding that what is needed is more apprenticeships and a closer relationship between the worlds of education and work.
Perhaps another factor behind Spain's sporting prowess is that sport is a sector where talent encounters fewer obstacles on the road to success. Unlike, for example, starting up a business. Spain is ranked 133 out of 183 countries in ease of setting up a business and it sits at number 31 in Transparency International's corruption index, one place above Botswana.
It takes around 140 days to set up a business here, giving Spanish civil servants, many of whom seem to carry a special "No" chromosome, ample time in which to crush even the most entrepreneurial spirit. As a result of all this, around a fifth of the economy is, as they say here, submerged. And as everyone knows, it also provides work for quite a few of those statistically unemployed youth.
Spain does have its non-sporting success stories. In retail clothing, for example, Zara, Mango and Desigual are global giants. But even if all the three million immigrants who have arrived in the past 10 years go home – which they won't – in the medium term there is not going to be nearly enough work to soak up the surplus. So, with only a low and uncompetitive industrial base and poorly paid agricultural jobs to choose from, what should young people turn their hand to, aside from sport? The arts, perhaps?
After all, in recent years many young Brits discovered that picking up a guitar, a pen or a paintbrush can be more profitable – and more fun – than wielding a hammer or a trowel. So, in echoes of Britain's cultural flowering of the 1990s, perhaps Spain's sporting success can translate into more success for its world-class fashion and design industries, turn the tide of gloom and pessimism and usher in a hopeful era of Cool España. Read More
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