Kings of Europe

It takes years to rebuild a team. It takes a bit longer when it’s a team that’s ruled world football for more than half-a-decade when a nation’s ‘golden generation’ were almost impossible to beat. That was Spain, winners of Euro 2008, World Cup 2010, and Euro 2012—where they slaughtered a quality Italy team 4-0 like boys in an alley having an afternoon of unadulterated fun. And then it was over. The golden boys were ageing men, slower, their gameplan no longer surprising anyone, their style of play adapted, diluted and disrupted by counter tactics. By World Cup 2018, tiki-taka was a joke. It has taken a decade since the 1-5 defeat in the group stages of World Cup 2014 to the Netherlands—the same Dutch Andrés Iniesta’s 116-minute goal had vanquished in the 2010 final—and 12 years since their last final for La Roja to win a major tournament, one second in stature and popularity only to the World Cup.

Luis de la Fuente, the Spanish coach, didn’t have the profile of Vicente del Bosque, the giant who had managed Spain to their 2010 and 2012 triumphs and oversaw the longest period of their dominance of world football, and of Luis Aragonés who had built the first champion Spanish team between 2006 and 2008. And yet, De la Fuente has just won his third Euro, having already coached Spain’s U-19s and U-21s to European championship glory. He was asked to take over a rebuilt La Roja that didn’t quite deliver when it exited the 2022 World Cup in the round of 16 again, as it had done in 2018, albeit this time under a competent but unlucky manager like Luis Enrique. Enrique had done well till then but it wasn’t enough. Spain had to rebuild from scratch. Sunday night at the Olympiastadion in Berlin vindicated De la Fuente and the overhaul he had undertaken.

The unanimous judgment of pundits, including English veterans, and most fans, except understandably the English, is that football won in Berlin on July 15. Spain didn’t come into Euro 2024 as the favourites but the team that hadn’t lost a match in a year-and-a-half quickly stamped its quality on the tournament. The 3-0 victory against premium opponents Croatia in their first match was a statement of intent. La Roja quickly became the favourites and the team to beat. They went all the way, without losing a match, without conceding a goal from their opponents in open play till Florian Wirtz’s 89^th-minute equaliser in the quarter-final against Germany (the only other open play goal was Robin Le Normand’s own-goal against Georgia). On their way from the group stages to lifting the trophy, they beat Italy, Germany, France and then England—all World Champions, three of them past Euro champions. It couldn’t have been harder. The player of the tournament award for Rodri, without whose control of the midfield and calm head things might have been different for Spain and Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City on most occasions, and young player of the tournament award for Lamine Yamal, who just turned 17 on Saturday and became the Euro’s youngest scorer ever when he shot past France goalkeeper Mike Maignan (who, by the way, won the Golden Glove) after deceiving and dodging Adrien Rabiot (who had made the mistake of saying the kid needed to do more before the match) to score one of the goals of the tournament, were par for the course in the end. What was demonstrated, rather, was that Spain are still a system team although it’s a different system from that of the golden era of 2008-14.

And that brings us back to De la Fuente. Professorial coaches perhaps work better for Spain than yesterday’s stars on the pitch. De la Fuente, in brief, managed the best of both worlds—he kept Spain’s basic possession-based play but not possession for its own sake which had become their bane over the last decade. In more than one of their victories in this Euro, Spain actually had less possession than their opponents. De la Fuente preferred Spain to play a more vertical game, with two wingers attacking along both flanks—and Yamal and Nico Williams were outstanding—and switching when need be. And no team, as De la Fuente has said, in the world currently presses their opponents as much as Spain. The days when an Iniesta and Xavi would ensure the other team didn’t touch the ball and Spain would also score goals and invariably win were long over. And yet, Spain couldn’t return to their pre-2008 days when La Roja had great players, were always one of the best footballing sides, but didn’t have the killer instinct to go all the way. Those La Rojas were teams of individuals. Great players but they didn’t win. Spain had to be a system team.

The final showed the difference. England depended on individuals to come in a make a difference—and the sharp Cole Palmer did. Spain could replace on-pitch players with substitutes who came in and did the same thing all over again. Losing Rodri at half-time was a big blow. His replacement, Martín Zubimendi, as the commentators observed, is a tidy player but there’s only one Rodri. It didn’t matter. A tiring Fabián Ruiz worked a bit more and together, they held the midfield. Right now, this new Spanish system—De la Fuente’s—is optimising the best of the old and combining it with the new without slipping back into the chokers’ mindset of a still earlier era. It works because De la Fuente took the players he knew would fit the system and do the job. There was only one player each from Barcelona and Real Madrid in Sunday’s XI.

After the match, Pedri, on the bench since a brutal injury in the quarter-final against Germany—and whose replacement Dani Olmo ended as one of the stars of the tournament—swapped his red shirt for another red with the legend ‘Reyes de la Europa’ on the back. Kings of Europe. Spain are on the throne again. Incidentally, World Champions Argentina retained the Copa America in Miami in a final Colombia could have won. Argentina and Brazil are bigger than Spain in world football. But the Copa isn’t the Euro which Spain have now won four times, more than any other nation. One of football’s most thinking nations has returned to its winning ways (while another, Germany, still has a lot of work to do). It’s a victory for spectacular, attacking football, notwithstanding the over-cautiousness of both teams in the first half of the final, and the Berlin heat and humidity.

Beautiful football doesn’t always win, as Telê Santana’s Brazil proved only too well in the 1982 World Cup or Johan Cruyff’s flying Dutchmen in 1974. But when it does, there’s nothing in the world like it.

Alvaro MorataEnglandfootballGermanyHenri Delaunay TrophyOlympiastadionSpainUEFA Euro 2024