The impact of cultural habits on economic regimes accepted but also given their proper place, I sincerely hope Europeans are able to grasp the irrelevance of subsidies to Spanish football clubs to the whole of the economic environment in Europe.
In football rort terms, we're talking about tens, at most hundreds of millions of euro. In eurozone debt crisis terms, perhaps hundreds of billions, or upwards of a trillion euro? There are perhaps four or five orders of magnitude difference.
I agree RM and Barca shouldn't get these kinks of assistance, but removing them would be to suck a drop from the ocean of Spain's financial problems.
The economic differences between Germany and Spain are determined partly by history and culture, yes, but primarily by transnational corporate influence peddling and the related decisions and disposition of plant and skilled labour, over decades and centuries of parallel development.
Yet people talk as if a Spaniard can simply stand up and generate wealth as fast as a German embedded from birth in one of the world's largest incumbent manufacturing economic zones, a citizen of a state that also, for what it's worth, maintains a (suitably sanctimonious) grip on continental politics.
It's a senseless and deluded humanist viewpoint that militates against a macro understanding of the problems affecting places like Portugal, Greece and Spain—workforce participation rates, education systems, etc—by blaming individuals based on false stereotypes and misplaced faith in the crumbling vestiges of the whole concept of the nation state.
