The World Cup-winning football team from Spain won the Prince of Asturias prize for sports on Tuesday, with the jury of the foundation named for Spain's Crown Prince Felipe lavishing praise on the squad and calling it a model for the world's most popular sport.
"The team has the virtue of creating a technique and a playing style that are admired around the world and held up in many countries as the standard to seek," the jury said.
It also noted the ecstatic outpouring of flag-waving national pride leading up to and after the team's 1-0 win over the Netherlands in the World Cup final in South Africa on July 11.
"From a social standpoint, the team managed to make the whole country vibrate with its victories and embrace them as if they were its own," the jury said of the national team, which also won the European Championship in 2008.
It named each and every player, from goalkeeper Iker Casillas to midfielder Andres Iniesta, who scored Spain's goal in the World Cup final.
The sports award is one of eight Asturias prizes granted each year in categories including arts, literature, communications and scientific research. The prizes are among Spain's most prestigious and are presented by Crown Prince Felipe each fall in the northern city of Oviedo, capital of the Asturias region.
Last year's winner in the sports category was Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva.
The sports award is defined as going to the person, persons or organization which "besides being exemplary in their life and work, has achieved new goals in humanity's struggle to excel and with their effort has contributed in an extraordinary way to the perfecting, nurturing, promotion and spread of sports."
One last Asturias prize remains to be handed out this year: in a category known as concord, which honors those who work for peace and fight poverty and injustice.
