Los Angeles hosts battle of the Habsburgs

This post was originally published on Politico.

A peculiar family rivalry will play out today in Inglewood, California, where Spain and Austria battle it out on the soccer field.

For hundreds of years of history, both countries were ruled by members of a common dynasty: the Habsburgs. Thanks to an extensive, deliberate strategy of dynastic intermarriage, the Germanic clan progressively accumulated territories across Europe, and eventually ended up with members of the family sitting on the thrones of both the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empires (as well as its later, smaller iteration, the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

For centuries, the branches of the clan respectively ruling from imperial