Spain's Soccer Team, a Champion for the Facebook Age

In dispatching Italy 4-0 in the final of the European Championship, Spain’s national soccer team has now completed an unprecedented triple: winning the 2008 and 2012 Euro Cups and, sandwiched between them, the 2010 World Cup. All of this while playing a distinctive brand of soccer known as “tiki-taka”—a mesmerizing skein of quick passes that break down opponents’ defenses with a lock picker’s patience and guile. La Furia Roja (“The Red Fury”), as Spanish fans call their team, has launched itself into the debate over which is the greatest national team ever.

Comparisons between teams playing in different eras is futile in any sport, of course, but a major difference between soccer and the American sports trifecta of baseball, basketball, and football is that soccer is so much less amenable to quantification. Baseball has batting averages, steals, slugging percentage, errors, earned-run average, and more abstruse measures like WHIP; soccer, in large part because it is a fluid, continuous game, has far fewer things to count and compare. This makes the evaluation of what’s happening on the pitch far more subjective, both for fans and coaches.