David Villa began the 2010s as top scorer in La Liga and the 2020s as champion in Japan, a 20-year career drawing to a close the way he always wanted it to. He had built to this, putting pressure on himself, and on Jan. 2, after 863 games and 440 goals across the national team and eight clubs on three continents, he added Japan's Emperor's Cup to the league, the cup, the Champions League, the Club World Cup, the World Cup and the Euros. Then, aged 38, arguably Spain's greatest ever striker, he was finally gone.
A new life in a new decade: Villa will run a new club in New York City.
A lot has happened since Villa made his debut at Sporting Gijon in the 2000-01 season, a career that spanned virtually this entire century thus far, winning titles at Real Zaragoza, Valencia, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid before leaving Spain six years ago, heading to Australia, the U.S. and Japan. And a lot has happened since Barca's opening game of the decade, a 1-1 draw against Villarreal at the Camp Nou. That day, Villarreal's manager was Ernesto Valverde; these days, he's on the other side, although probably not for much longer.
Where Barcelona will go next is uncertain; where Spanish football will go is uncertain too -- all the more so when one thing that is known is the first stop, and that's Saudi Arabia for the Spanish Super Cup (Valencia vs. Real Madrid on Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, Barcelona vs. Atletico Madrid on Thursday at 2 p.m. ET; final on Jan. 12 at 1 p.m. ET; stream live on ESPN).
Villa's career path reflects shifts in the game. His move to Barcelona was part of a developing trend, and the final years were too, only it's not just players going abroad to emerging markets now, it is competitions too, and there will be more. Villa signed for Barcelona from Valencia in May 2010. A month later, David Silva followed him out of Mestalla, heading for Manchester City. A year on, Juan Mata left for Chelsea. And a year after that, Jordi Alba went to Barcelona.
Valencia were Spain's third force at the time, the last team to win the league other than Barca and Madrid -- back in 2004 -- and third three years in a row: 2010, 2011 and 2012. But they had finished 18, 15 and 29 points off the top, closer to relegation than the title when it came to points, and here they were debilitated year on year. The year after, Sevilla (who had already lost Dani Alves in 2008) sold Ivan Rakitic to Barcelona. Players with ambition at the "other clubs" had to get out, it seemed. When Roberto Soldado left for Tottenham in 2013, the last man fell: he had been the only player in the Spain squad not playing for Real Madrid, Barcelona or abroad.
Spain were at the Confederations Cup as European champions, for the second time in a row. They were World Cup winners, too. This was a golden age for Spanish football. Think back to Madrid vs. Barcelona, Pep Guardiola vs. Jose Mourinho, Cristiano Ronaldo vs. Lionel Messi and it is hard to imagine anything better. The 2009-10 season ended with Barcelona on 99 points. In the next three years, the champions' points totals read: 96, 100, 100. But if those numbers are good, they are also bad. Extraordinary, but flawed.
It was not that many feared Madrid and Barcelona winning every title, it was that they feared these giants winning every game. The big two were becoming the only two. Too much dominance, however good the teams -- and they were good, driven by two of the greatest players of this or any generation ever -- risks being the death of competition. But then, as if to prove that you never can tell, as if to slap the doomsayers round the face, the next year Atletico Madrid went and won the league.
With time, with Atletico establishing themselves as a genuine force, second in each of the past two years and twice Champions League runners-up, shifting the structure of Spanish football, it has become too easy to forget how extraordinary that was -- probably the most impossible title there has even been in Spain.
The risk lay in believing that Atletico's success meant everything was fine. It wasn't. But there was action. As the decade opened, the debate was already live. The overturning of the Beckham Law in late 2009 led the league's then-vice president, Javier Tebas, to foresee "the end," a competition without foreign stars that would become "mediocre," "substandard," but he knew that was minor compared with other issues. "The lack of a collective TV deal is the biggest problem we have," Tebas said soon after taking over, getting closer to the real problem. Sevilla's sporting director Monchi had noted: "Spain reminds me of Scotland."
The gaps were too large, and so were the clubs' debts. As then-secretary of state for sport Miguel Cardenal said in the middle of the decade: the situation had been "catastrophic," "two-thirds of the clubs [were] in administration," Spanish football was on the verge of "collapse," at the "edge of a cliff." It's hard to imagine a more pessimistic portrait. Studies placed Spanish football's debt at €3.5 billion. In 2011, almost €700m was owed by clubs to Spain's tax authorities alone. Mostly, they had just carried on regardless. The state bemoaned its lack of coercive force; soon, though, it started to act. So did the game.
TV deals, struck individually, enshrined inequality. At the start of the decade, the figures read: €120m for Madrid and Barcelona. Sevilla, third at the end of 2008-2009, were making not much more than €20m, Valencia €30m. With Valencia becoming the third force, the figures were €140m against €42m. Teams at the bottom were closer to €17m. That reflected a social reality, impossible to avoid entirely, but it was far from ideal. The threat always lingered of Madrid and Barcelona breaking out alone.
In 2015, the league managed to tie the clubs to a collective deal. It was enshrined in law for one simple reason: it had to be. That was the only way of preventing the biggest clubs from breaking from it further down the line. It needed to be watertight, which meant it needed to be law. The way of securing their support (or at least their acquiescence in the short term) to reach that point was to protect their predominance and to increase the overall level of income, which they did. Fifty percent of the money is distributed equally among the first-division clubs, 25 percent is based on results and 25 percent on "implantación social" -- how big they are, in other words. Madrid and Barcelona.
At the same time, strict financial controls were imposed. That constrained some clubs -- and there are other areas in which the league's management can be challenged or questioned -- but it also played a part in curing much of Spanish football, bringing debts down. That €700m in 2011 is less than €200m now, and the league claims that only €50m of that is on hold and thus problematic; the rest is part of functioning payment plans. Meanwhile, players lodging official complaints against clubs was common once but is not anymore.
Equality is greater too, but things are still not equal. Points totals remain high for the champions -- 94, 91, 93, 93, 87 since Atletico won the league in 2014 -- but the sense of guaranteed victory has diminished as competition increases. All the while, Spanish football performed. Sevilla, Athletic Bilbao and Atletico all reached Europa League finals in the 2010s; Barcelona had won the Champions league in 2011; and from 2014 onwards, Madrid won four out of five, with the other going to Barcelona. Two of those finals had been against Atletico.
TV deals have increased, and the money has been distributed better. On the last complete set of figures available, 2018-19, Barcelona made €166.5m, Real Madrid €155.3m, Atletico €119.3m. The team who finished bottom, Huesca, made €44m. The gap is reducing, and the overall amounts are growing, but it is still big: a ratio of 3.7 from top to bottom, compared with 9.4 in 2012-13. And, remember, this is TV money only.
The bottom nine clubs put together do not make as much as the top three. In the Premier League, by contrast, Liverpool made €152m last season while Huddersfield, who finished bottom, got €96.6m. And the overall amounts the Premier League make still dwarf the rest, even with Spain's total up near €1.6bn in 2018-19. Madrid and Barcelona are the two richest clubs in the world, according to Deloitte, but you have to go all the way down to 13th to find Atletico. Sevilla are 27th. This is the battle now: competing. And withstanding competition.
The threat remains England, of course. Inside the league, they know that. Last year's results in Europe -- two all-Premier League finals -- did not surprise in Spain. The surprise was that it hadn't happened sooner. Now, that dominance looks harder than ever, which deepens other threats.
One is Barcelona and Madrid's willingness to contemplate a breakaway; their unwillingness to be tied to a model that is not enough for them, clubs that are smaller. The idea of a European Super League, that old bogeyman, won't go away. Alternatives have to be offered, ways of fighting back. Spain (and other domestic leagues, even UEFA) have to protect themselves.
New revenue is sought, and that means expansion. Clubs want growth, always. That means "improvements," some of which might not improve much. The desire to wring every benefit from football is relentless, to chase money, sell the sport -- and its soul? No one knows where it will take us, but it seems increasingly unlikely to take us back.
Last season, the league famously tried to take a game to Miami. They failed then, and they failed again this time around, blocked by the RFEF -- the institution with which they have gone to war. The same federation that, apparently seeing no contradiction in its ethical objection then, has decided to redesign the Spanish Super Cup and take it to Saudi Arabia next week.
So, we know where the decade starts -- at Valladolid on Friday, where Leganes earned a 2-2 draw, and then a long way away next weekend -- but not yet where it ends. Nor is it just them. There will be a European Cup final outside Europe this century, domestic finals elsewhere. It starts now, in the fabulously rich Saudi Arabia.
Much changes, sometimes for the better -- and some changes that were resisted rightly won out -- but not always. The ball is still round, though. The game is the game, if sometimes a little less so -- and football tends to find a way. Some things remain constant, comforting. On the first weekend of 2010, Villa was Spain's top scorer. On the second, Messi scored a hat trick and joined him. But even he will be gone soon.