Spain arrive at Wembley for Saturday’s Nations League meeting with England (19:45 BST) as the dominant force in men’s world football. World champions, European champions and Olympic champions, they are unbeaten in two and a half years and have not lost since a 1-0 defeat by Colombia in a 2024 friendly — a run of 38 matches that stands as an international record. Of the past 10 major international tournaments, they have won five.
The success stretches well beyond the senior men’s team. Over the same period Spain have won six Under-19 European Championships, three Under-21 European Championships and the Women’s World Cup in 2023. At club level, Spanish sides have claimed half of all the Champions League and Europa League titles available since 2009.
Spain football expert Guillem Balague told BBC Radio 5 Live that there are “three pillars” behind the country’s coaching culture and its unprecedented success. The first, he said, was university, and in particular something called the National Institute of Physical Education. University entered physical education in Spain a long time ago, in the 1990s, producing physical coaches and football coaches with a deep understanding of learning and training processes. Some of those fitness coaches went on to become major managers, among them Rafa Benitez and Marcelino Garcia Toral — figures who, Balague argued, “came from learning and studying what football was about ahead of anybody else”.
The second pillar is Basque culture, which Balague described as historically a special reference within Spanish football, tied to work ethic, “massive work ethic, daily effort”. The third is the Barcelona influence — Johan Cruyff and the tactical revolution that followed through him.
That Barcelona thread runs from Cruyff’s first European Cup with the club in 1992, won playing the total football pioneered by the Netherlands team of the 1970s in which he played, through Pep Guardiola’s management between 2008 and 2012. It was a period in which Barcelona won three consecutive La Liga titles while Spain won back-to-back European Championships in 2008 and 2012 either side of their 2010 World Cup triumph. Eight players from the club’s La Masia academy were in the Spain squad for that 2010 World Cup under Vicente del Bosque, and another eight were in Luis de la Fuente’s group as they lifted the trophy again this summer.
Barcelona’s academy is built around a specific idea of what a player should be. Jordi Gratacos, the club’s international director of academies from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2016 to 2020, told BBC Radio 5 Live that the number one thing is to understand the tactical meaning of the technical action — to create intelligent players who are technically very good, and who always decide the best option inside the field and make others better. “The most important thing is that they need to decide inside the game,” he said.
Hansi Flick is now repeating what Guardiola did, winning two La Liga titles in a row and chasing a third, with academy products such as Lamine Yamal, Dani Olmo and Pau Cubarsi forming the engine of his project at both club and international level, just as the generation of 2008-12 did.
If Barcelona and Catalonia represent the artistry of Spanish football, the Basque Country represents its character. Five players in the 2026 World Cup squad came from the region and came through at either Athletic Bilbao or Real Sociedad, clubs where eight players were playing at the time Spain won Euro 2024. Mikel Merino, though not Basque — he is from Pamplona in the autonomous community of Navarre — scored a quarter-final winner against Germany at Euro 2024, went on to score six goals in six games in World Cup qualifying, and added late winners against Portugal and Belgium over the summer.
Cesar Azpilicueta, the former Chelsea captain and Spain international, grew up in Zizur Mayor, just five kilometres from Pamplona. Asked to describe Basque culture, he told BBC Radio 5 Live: “The discipline, the culture of working hard, of not giving up or being resilient, not very flashy.” He added that while people often want to display a culture of fight and physicality, in tactical terms the approach is “more compact, great knowledge of knowing where to go, and with the ball keep it simple and try to go forward as quick as possible”.
The Basque contingent has been central to Spain’s recent success. Cruyff once said: “The first thing I did as a coach, was to sign four players from the Basque region. They are not afraid of anything.” Under De la Fuente in 2026, Unai Simon played in goal, with former Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte a key cornerstone of a defence that conceded just one goal in eight matches across the tournament. Nico Williams assisted the winning goal for Ferran Torres in the final against Argentina, Martin Zubimendi made a positive impact from the bench in both the Euro 2024 and World Cup finals, and Mikel Oyarzabal has scored 18 goals in his past 20 Spain appearances. The influence stretches off the pitch too: Basque coaches are in charge at four of England’s biggest clubs — Mikel Arteta at Arsenal, Unai Emery at Aston Villa, Xabi Alonso at Chelsea and Andoni Iraola at Liverpool.
The final pillar is education. Former Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez recalled creating in Spain “a group of fitness coaches who knew about football”. He went to Liverpool John Moores University to see the programme of the sports scientists, he said, and found they did not have the knowledge in football that Spain had. They were really good in fitness, but with the ball and on the pitch they did not know how to manage, he explained, adding that England did not have this professional specialist in football, sports medicine and everything they were studying at university. “That was a crucial part of the formation of why Spain was improving and has been improving since then.”