South Africa 2010: Iniesta's goal, Spain's first star and the only champions who started by losing
- Iniesta's goal was decisive in the South Africa 2010 final, giving Spain their first World Cup title
- Spain established itself as the tournament's top team, demonstrating superior football throughout the competition
- Spain was the only champion that started the tournament losing, achieving the historic comeback until conquering the title
Eighty years. Since 1930, Spain had been to thirteen World Cups and had never gone beyond the quarter-finals. The furthest they'd managed was fourth place in 1950. And then, on 11 July 2010, all of that changed in one night.
🇿🇦 2010 World Cup by the numbers
- Host nation
- South Africa
- Teams
- 32
- Champions
- 🏆 Spain
- Runners-up
- Netherlands
- Final
- Spain 1-0 (aet) Netherlands
- Stadium
- Soccer City · Johannesburg
- Attendance
- 84,490
- Top scorer
- Four players with 5 goals each, including David Villa
Losing to start
Spain arrived in South Africa as European champions and overwhelming favourites. And they lost their opening match, 1-0 to Switzerland, on one of those days where the ball just won't go in.
The bit that makes it historic: no team had ever won a World Cup after losing their opening match. Spain were the first and remain the only ones.
From there they beat Honduras and Chile, and then came the strangest bit: Portugal 0-1, Paraguay 0-1, Germany 0-1 and Netherlands 0-1. Four knockout matches, four one-goal victories, not a single goal conceded from the round of 16 onwards. World champions with eight goals in seven matches, the lowest tally of any world champions.
The roughest final
Soccer City, Johannesburg, 84,490 people. The Netherlands, who arrived with a very different style of football to the Total Football of 1974, decided that you couldn't beat Spain by playing pretty and went out looking for war.
English referee Howard Webb showed fourteen yellow cards, a final record. The moment that sums it up: Nigel de Jong planted his sole on Xabi Alonso's chest right on his breastbone. Yellow card. Webb has since admitted he'd give a red today.
Casillas denied Robben a one-on-one with the tip of his boot when the match was slipping away. And in the 116th minute, Cesc threaded the pass, Iniesta controlled it and slotted it home. He tore off his shirt to reveal a handwritten message: «Dani Jarque, always with us», for his friend who had died a year earlier.
That an octopus from a German aquarium got every World Cup result right and there was something inexplicable about it.
That the hits were real: he nailed all eight predictions asked of him in 2010, including seven for Germany and the final. And that the explanation is too: the octopus chose between two transparent boxes with a flag stuck on and food inside, and octopuses react to shapes, contrasts and colours — his preference for horizontal stripes and certain shades has been noted. With two options, getting eight in a row right has odds of 1 in 256: unlikely, but nothing extraordinary when dozens of animals around the world were making predictions and only the one who got it right became famous. Paul died in October 2010 and they built him a monument in his aquarium.
That team won by just passing the ball around doing nothing and playing 1-0 matches.
That eight goals in seven matches is fact, and it's the lowest tally for any champion. But it's worth looking at the other side: just two goals conceded in the entire tournament and none from the quarter-finals onwards. And above all, the context: opponents stopped trying to beat Spain by playing football. The Netherlands made their point with De Jong's sole. When every opponent's plan is to stop football being played, winning four knockout ties 1-0 in a row isn't a lack of ambition: it's resilience.
That Luis Suárez robbed Ghana of the first African semi-final in history with a handball on the line, and got away with it.
That he didn't get away with it: he was sent off and a penalty was awarded, which is exactly what the rulebook says. What happened next wasn't down to him — Asamoah Gyan smashed the penalty against the crossbar in the last minute of extra time and Uruguay won the shootout. The debate isn't about whether there was a punishment, but whether the punishment is enough when a handball prevents a certain goal. Suárez has never shown remorse and called it «the Uruguayan hand of God». Ghana still hasn't reached a semi-final.
The first African World Cup
Best not to let Spain's story overshadow the bigger picture: this was the first time the tournament was played in Africa, sixteen years after apartheid ended, and there was serious doubt over whether South Africa could pull it off. They did.
What remained were the vuvuzelas, that constant buzzing that drove half the world's viewers mad and the FIFA nearly banned. And the shock exits of the two previous finalists: Italy and France went out in the group stage, the French while in open revolt, with players refusing to train.
What remains
Spain became the eighth World Cup winners and the first to win a European Championship, a World Cup and another European Championship in succession. The photo of the bus down the Castellana, the Yo soy español and that summer are one of those things anyone who lived through it remembers with precision.
And this series has a nice full circle: the country that missed a World Cup by a ballot in 1954, the one with the disaster at home in 1982, the one with Tassotti's elbow and the disallowed goals in Korea, took eighty years and did it all at once.
- The photos of the final and celebrations are from fans and media with Creative Commons licensing, via Wikimedia Commons; each carries its author credit below.
