Spain became the first international team to go 40 matches unbeaten on Tuesday with a 4-1 Uefa Nations League win against Croatia in Seville.
That followed a weekend when the European and world champions defeated an England side ranked fourth in the world, 3-2 at Wembley. Spain’s Under-20 women's team were crowned world champions with a triumph against North Korea on Sunday.
Most of those players were already Under-17 world champions in 2024, retaining the title they had won in 2022. Spanish international footballers have often known each other since childhood.
Spain’s senior women’s team, like the men's team, are ranked No 1 in the world and won the World Cup in 2023, the Nations League in 2024 and 2025. And so on.
Spain boast, by many metrics and at various levels, male and female, the best international teams on the planet, but why is this so? Why is the country with Europe’s sixth-highest population of 49 million so good, not only for players, but coaches too?
In club football, Spanish coaches including Luis Enrique, Pep Guardiola, Andoni Iraola, Mikel Arteta, Unai Emery and Xabi Alonso – the latter four from a tiny Basque province of Gipuzkoa – can lay claim to being at the top of the game.
First, there’s the football. “Spanish football has a big advantage over the rest because it has excellent technical and tactical understanding, but they also have a very good, sporting and fighting mentality,” Jordi Cruyff told The National.
Cruyff grew up in Barcelona and played for several Spanish clubs and is now technical director at Dutch side Ajax. “Their rule number one is ‘first we compete’ and then ‘the better we play, the more chances we have to win’. And if that doesn’t work out, they have competitiveness.
“Spain won the World Cup because of the talent, yet they also won the World Cup because they only conceded one goal in seven games. The moment they don’t have the ball, they work together as a team to win it back.
“They can adapt to all weather scenarios: the heat, the cold, high grass, low grass, because they must do that at home. And if they have a good day, they have enough to be the best. It’s not a coincidence. They can play dominating football but they can compete when they’re being dominated.”
Cruyff’s name also inadvertently lends another argument for why Spain does well. The 300 Cruyff Courts, many in Spain, which take their name from his father, Johan, allow free access to an informal cage-type football setting that can hone street skills to complement more formal coaching.
It’s not just at the very highest level where Spanish coaches excel. Manolo Marquez moved to India and won the Super League with unfancied Hyderabad in 2022 and the Super Cup with Goa last year.
“Spain has a continuity in style,” he explains. “The players who play for the national team at under-17s are still playing together for the full national side. Spain has such good technical and tactical levels that opponents barely get the ball, let alone chances. And they have incredible strength in depth: they won the World Cup without two of their best players, in Lamine Yamal and Pedri, coming close to their best level.”
Not that they are a side of superstar names. Spain’s main centre-forward, Mikel Oyarzabal, has spent his whole career at Real Sociedad where he’s perfectly happy playing with and in front of his friends and living in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.
“Spain don’t even have a big-name striker,” Arnau Riera, formerly Lionel Messi’s captain at Barca B told The National. “They had Alex Baena for Atletico, Oyarzabal, Dani Olmo. Put them together and they do well. A top coach sees players like this and makes them work.
“Aside from that, there are mainly factors which make Spain world champions for both men and women. When Spain won the 2010 World Cup it gave footballers confidence that they could beat anyone. Before that, Spain was never a winner. We’d play well and lose at the biggest stages. But then we had [Andres] Iniesta, Xavi, Xabi Alonso and [Sergio] Busquets showing that they could win against anyone.
“In 2026, Spain had the best midfield. They showed up against France and Argentina, stayed composed, held the ball like no other team. They hold the ball in dangerous areas – in attack and defence – so few teams do that. Spain do”.
Surprisingly, there were no players from Real Madrid when Spain’s World Cup squad was announced. “Half the players were from Barcelona and you must credit them with being prepared to use players early: Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsi, Ferran Torres, Pedri, Gavi,” adds Riera.
“They make their debuts as teenagers, they’re physically and mentally ready because of the Masia academy model and also because of Barcelona’s [German)] coach Hansi Flick. Cubarsi was 18 and didn’t make a single mistake in the World Cup finals. It’s incredible.”
The above views focus on the footballing aspects, but the success Spain now produces has taken generations to build, and it can be seen in every city, town and village around the country.
From Catalonia or Asturias in the north to Murcia or Andalusia in the south, even a village of 500 people will have top-level football facilities, often a latest-generation artificial surface. Twenty years ago, they were sand and clay pitches.
These artificial pitches are funded by the local council and looked after by the host club. They are well used by that club, but beneath the men's first team there are often a dozen junior sides, both male and female.
In inner-city areas such as Cornella in Barcelona, the club, which was bought by Lionel Messi earlier this year, boasts 1,100 footballers. Cornella have an incredible 15 under-11 teams. The players in 12 of those sides pay to be coached, around €500 per year per player. That’s good value if you’re training three times per week and playing at the weekend.
But the best two teams in this age group don’t pay – some of the top talents are from the poorest backgrounds and would struggle to pay – and Cornella’s elite youth teams play in the Liga Nacional against their equivalents at Barca or Espanyol in a 10-team group.
Spain has these football factories all over. It boasts more coaches (150,462 federated licences of which 9,539 are women) than almost any country. Higher up, Spain has 10 times as many Uefa-licensed coaches as England, despite England having eight million more residents.
In 2017, Spain had 13,000 Uefa A licence coaches against 1,700 in England. It helps that it costs between € 5,000 and € 7,000 to reach a Uefa Pro level in Spain, against around £15,000 (€16,000) in England.
Football is by far the most popular sport in the country and the Mediterranean climate – and diet, which leads to one of the highest life expectancies in the world – helps. Few games are postponed in winter because of inclement weather.
It’s also a hotbed of football talent where the academy systems at Spanish clubs are particularly strong. Barcelona’s La Masia is the most famous, yet Real Sociedad won Spain’s Copa del Rey in May with an incredible 10 players who had come through their youth system.
Spanish footballers excel technically; their style is suited to modern football and uniformly quality pitches. Kids are taught to attack quickly from the start, with speed and awareness, and they train frequently Parents do not interfere.
That technical superiority and control of the match, as seen in the World Cup final, is systemic in the style of play from a young age. The principles taught from a young age allow for the greatest chances – as individuals contributing to the team – to control matches with the ball.
“Spain is institutionalised and geographically so,” one leading agent tells The National. “The best players are picked up by their local big clubs. There are clear pathways forward if they’re good enough.
“There’s also not as much money in youth football in Spain compared to England, for example, and that helps them. They don’t have Brexit so players can leave and arrive aged 16. That balances the books and brings prices down because there’s more fluidity in the market.
“If a player wants to go, they can say, ‘We’ll go and buy the best player from AC Milan’. But they don’t need to do that as they have so much talent on their doorstep.”
