TLet’s take a moment and look at this statistic: Since May 2001, Spanish teams (national and club) have played against non-Spanish teams in 22 major finals (Champions League, Europa League, World Cup, Euros). And Spanish teams have won all 22 of those matches.
Of the 22 teams who lost, English clubs Fulham, Liverpool and Manchester United were eliminated all three times, and while the English may have been smug about reaching the final, it was Spain who won.
The fact is, Spain isn’t just good at the game, they win all the time. They just know what to do. Never mind the Germans, the Argentinians, the Brazilians, Spain have become the most ruthless winning machine in the history of football.
And there’s a reason for that: Ernest Hemingway was dead wrong about this country: it’s not a bullfighting-crazed country, and golf wasn’t what got Iberians excited, even when Seve Ballesteros was at the height of his powers.
Fernando Alonso’s rise to the top wasn’t enough to get the Spaniard hooked on Formula 1, nor was Rafael Nadal’s stellar tennis career enough to get the nation’s heart rate up for the sport. Miguel Indurain’s multiple Tour de France victories didn’t stop the nation from paying attention. But football is different. Spain is too football-obsessed to focus the nation’s attention on anything else.
One only has to watch the evening television news to realise how important kicking a ball is: every night, the hour-long news bulletin includes at least 20 minutes of football news.
In Spain, football gets far more airtime and print space than any other sport. There is even a national newspaper dedicated to football. You might think that the British would be obsessed with football, but in Spain it’s on another level, which is odd because the Spanish national team hasn’t been very strong for decades.
Real Madrid had dominated the European club world, but they did so with a fleet of foreign superstars – yes, they had won the European Championship in 1964 – but that achievement was as unsubstantiated as England’s success at the World Cup two years later.
Instead, their international reputation became that of serial bottlers: losing to Northern Ireland in the 1982 World Cup, failing to qualify for Euro 92 and losing to South Korea in the 2002 World Cup – two decades of ineptitude.
Something needed to change. And it was everything. The Spanish Football Federation may have been justly criticised last year after Luis Rubiales’ World Cup fiasco, but back in the 1990s they were the most visionary and revolutionary institution in world football.
With the ultimate aim of strengthening the national team, they launched a grassroots revolution across the country. It was all about coaching. Borrowing methods from Barcelona’s famous La Masia finishing school, hundreds of coaches were trained in talent development. Technical development was made a priority.
Across the country, a single style was promoted: defenders on the ball, a love of possession and pass, pass, pass. Whereas in England there was the silly insistence on “putting them in a blender” and coaches yelling at defenders to “get them out”, in Spain it was all about possession.
The Spanish Football Association employed three times as many coaches as our own. Coaching was considered an academic discipline. You didn’t need to have played the game to coach. As proof of how good the system was, three of the four English Premier League clubs that qualified for the Champions League last season were managed by managers who had trained in the Spanish system: Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, Mikel Arteta at Arsenal and Unai Emery at Aston Villa.
Gradually, the system began to bring success on the pitch, as age-group national teams, coached with the same ball-hungry approach, began to dominate.
Possession football, easy to watch, progressive ability, everyone was comfortable on the ball and the young players learned how to win tournaments.
As players grew up in the system, they picked up the knowledge they learned. Spain won the Under-15 championship, then the Under-16, Under-18 and Under-21. With each generation, the knowledge of how to win tournaments was passed down, grown and developed.
But still, there were problems at the top level, and it was more a political problem than a problem of ability.
In many ways, it was a relic of the Franco era. For Catalans in the Basque Country or Barcelona, the national team was not a priority. On the contrary. Why should they root for a team that had long been the ultimate symbol of an oppressive regime?
When Spain played, the streets of Madrid, Valencia and Seville were decked out in red and yellow flags, while Bilbao, San Sebastian and Barcelona were met with not just indifference but bitter hostility.
That changed with the young players coming through the system, and as they mixed together and Catalans, Basques and Madridistas started winning age-group competitions, the idea of a unified Spain team began to take shape, but the real turning point came at the 2006 World Cup.
In selecting his team, coach Luis Aragonés left out Real Madrid great Raul, opting instead for young Cesc Fabregas from La Masia, but old rifts and fissures looked set to erupt again, with Madridistas shunning the new Catalan star and the Catalans rooting for their man against the internal foe.
But the mood changed dramatically when Barcelona captain Xavi Hernandez and Real Madrid’s Iker Casillas publicly stated that club factions should have no place in international matches. The rifts were no longer there and everyone was united.
From there, there was no turning back. A brilliant young team, trained in a system of pass, pass and more pass, that had won together at all ages, suddenly stuck. Spain won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012 in an era of unprecedented international dominance. Unlike England, this was a trophy-winning golden generation.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t last. France was closing in on the outside, introducing a coaching system that copied the Spanish model, as was Germany. Even England, looking to the glitz of the Premier League days, adopted a coaching approach that prioritised technical ability over athleticism. Gareth Southgate was at the heart of it all, overseeing a revolution that saw English teams win titles at under-17 and under-21 level.
Yes, Spain had problems when the superstar generation of Xavi and Casillas retired – they lost to Morocco on penalties at the 2022 World Cup – but the system remained intact – and now it’s producing the next wave of winners.
Lamine Yamal is a boy prodigy who celebrated his 17th birthday just days after scoring a spectacular goal in the Euros semi-final. Like Xavi, Fabregas and now Yamal, he was educated at La Masia. He learned the same system, the same methods and the same winning mentality.
That’s what England were up against. They have been taught to win from the moment they can trap the ball. It’s a mindset, a national character.