Isn’t youth a wonderful thing? Spain, like the football world at large, has fallen in love with two young Spanish footballers – Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams. Both are daredevil wingers, the sons of immigrants from north Africa, who play with smiles on their faces. Neither of them was a household name before the start of the tournament but each has gone on to light up the European Championship. This is befitting of a Spain team that has flown in under the radar, a discrete side, much like how Italy surprised everyone three years ago.
This Spain team is without galácticos. It was telling that seven Basque players – Williams, Unai Simón, Aymeric Laporte, Dani Vivian, Martín Zubimendi, Mikel Merino and Mikel Oyarzabal – featured in Spain’s 2-1 semi-final win over Kylian Mbappé's France on Tuesday night, and only one each from Barça and Real Madrid.
Real Sociedad in the Basque Country provides five players to the Spain squad, more than any other club. Times have changed. When Spain won the World Cup in 2010, its starting XI was made up of 10 footballers from Barça and Real Madrid – the clásico clubs that dominate cafe conversation in Spain – and a table quiz answer, the Espanyol left back Joan Capdevila.
Spain is unlike the star-studded teams of France, England and a Portugal side that was eaten alive by Cristiano Ronaldo. The ageing Ronaldo, the most famous person on the planet, according to social media indexes, is an athlete unable to accept the dying of the light, the Joe Biden of football. Spain, in contrast, is a squad without egos. The sum of its parts is greater than the whole. This is embodied in Rodri, the team’s midfield general.
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Rodri doesn’t make any fuss – on or off the pitch. He lacks the media profile of team-mates at Manchester City such as, say, Erling Haaland or Phil Foden, the darling of English football journalists. Rodri knows how to score important goals, like his 2023 Champions League final winner. City rarely lose when he plays. He has the longest unbeaten streak in European football history, not having lost in 74 consecutive club games for City (excluding two penalty shoot-out defeats).
Rodri learned how to defend at the feet of Diego Simeone, and from Pep Guardiola how to attack. Guardiola reveres Rodri, the player who dictates City’s rhythm of play, as he does for Spain – when to pass, press high, move deeper, break. Spain’s coach, Luis de la Fuente, describes him as “the perfect computer”, a higher intelligence that orchestrates Spain’s play.
Spain benefits from a defined style, knowing how to create space, where to pass, how to rest with the ball. Coaching, and football culture, is important. Spain invests in coaching. In 2017, for example, 15,459 coaches in Spain held Uefa’s two top coaching qualifications, compared with only 2,083 coaches in England. It’s no surprise Gareth Southgate’s England team selections and substitutions seem so improvised, like a man still learning on the job eight years after his appointment.
England played immediately before Spain on the same day in the last-16 round of games. The difference was stark between how easily Spain circulated the ball in its 4-1 win over Georgia and how England’s players, in their 2-1 extra-time defeat of Slovakia, plodded around, always needing an extra touch before offloading. Spanish players are taught from a young age to know where to pass the ball before it arrives at their feet. They play in the future.
When Spain crashed out of the 2022 World Cup finals to Morocco on penalties, the team’s manager, Luis Enrique, was fired. The decision to replace him with De la Fuente was a political appointment. He was a safe pair of hands after Enrique, a bolshie figure who was constantly at war with the Real Madrid-leaning press in Spain. But the choice of De la Fuente was still a gamble. The 63-year-old didn’t have a CV coaching at the highest level.
As a player, De la Fuente won back-to-back La Liga titles with a notoriously bruising Athletic Bilbao team in the early 1980s. As a coach, he trained underage teams and the reserve team at Athletic Bilbao. In 2013, he got a gig with Spain’s football federation and was immediately successful with several underage national teams, from which has come the nucleus of Spain’s Euro 2024 squad.
In 2015, he led Spain to an under-19 European Championship backboned by Rodri, the goalkeeper Simón and Merino, scorer of Spain’s dramatic last-minute winner against Germany in the quarter-final a week ago. In 2019, De la Fuente managed Spain to an under-21 European title. Rodri, linchpin in the team’s qualifying matches, was unable to play in the finals as he was tied up in transfer negotiations that took him that summer from Atletico Madrid to City.
Simón and Merino, however, were again pivotal players, along with Oyarzabal, Fabián, one of Spain’s surprise heroes en route to Sunday’s final in Berlin, and Dani Olmo, Spain’s top scorer so far in the Euro 2024 finals. De la Fuente also coached Spain to a silver medal at the last Olympics with a team that included Simón, Merino, Oyarzabal, Olmo, Zubimendi, the curly-haired Marc Cucurella, and Pedri, sidelined for the Euro 2024 finals since injuring his knee against Germany. These players have a winning tournament mentality. It shows.
Spain is the only team to have won its six matches in Germany, but it doesn’t just win, it entertains with a childlike relish and sense of abandon, unlike the anti-football mentality of more vaunted teams such as Portugal and France. De la Fuente’s Spain is ambitious. It isn’t afraid to attack and take risks. Its cavalier spirit is epitomised in the play of Williams and Yamal, the most dangerous wingers in the tournament. The goal Yamal scored to equalise against France in the semi-final was a work fit for a museum.
This Spain team can also read a game. Against France, it knew when to hold on to the ball in the second half, to take the sting out of the game, preserving its one-goal lead. It has character, mounting comebacks against both Georgia and France in the knock-out stages. And with the benefit of youth, it found another gear in extra-time against a jaded Germany team in the quarter-finals.
Having beaten the hosts Germany and the holders Italy, all that remains to vanquish is England, the pre-tournament favourites. England is the team of all talents, a team of moments and miracles. In Spanish footballing consciousness, England is a country of great standing, repeatedly referenced in Spain’s media as the game’s inventors, and home to European giants such as Liverpool and Manchester United. After an impressive semi-final victory over the Netherlands, England have found their stride, but they hold no fears for a youthful Spain side.
Youth has no regard for reputation. And Yamal, who turns 17 on Saturday, is the most precocious player to dominate a European Championship or World Cup finals since Pelé erupted on to the stage at the 1958 World Cup. There’s a sense that Spain’s thrilling team, which is gunning to become the only country to win four European titles, is about to make history. This one is theirs to lose.
