The last time Spain won a World Cup was 2010, in Johannesburg, with Andrés Iniesta’s extra-time goal against the Netherlands producing the most complete expression of a footballing philosophy — tiki-taka, positional play, the rondo as the unit of competitive meaning — that European football had yet seen. They won Euro 2008 before it, Euro 2012 after it. Three major tournaments in a row. The most successful international team of the era.
Then the style calcified, the players aged, and the decade between 2014 and 2024 became a period of rebuilding that passed through several stages — the end of the golden generation, the experiments with pace and directness that felt like a betrayal of the ideology, the slow emergence of a new group centred on La Masia graduates who carried the same positional DNA without being pale imitations of their predecessors.
Euro 2024 was the arrival. Spain won it in Berlin, with a team that defeated France and England in the knockout rounds and displayed a quality of attacking football — Lamine Yamal, Nico Williams, Pedri, Fabián Ruiz, Dani Olmo — that felt not like a continuation of the Iniesta era but something genuinely new. They were the best team in the tournament by a distance that was clearer at the end than any final scoreline suggested.
They arrive at the 2026 World Cup as the defending European champions, as La Liga champions through Barcelona’s extraordinary season under Flick, and with a squad depth that makes almost every opponent nervous. Luis de la Fuente announced on the twenty-fifth of May a group of twenty-six players that contains no Real Madrid players — for the first time in a generation, the national team has been assembled entirely without the club that has dominated European football for the past decade — and barely noticed the gap.
The No-Madrid Fact
The absence of Real Madrid players from the Spain squad is extraordinary as a statistical fact and genuinely explicable as a footballing decision. Real Madrid’s 2025-26 season was, by the club’s standards, a failure: Xabi Alonso departed in January after a difficult transitional period, Álvaro Arbeloa managed the rest of the campaign in interim, and the club finished nine points behind Barcelona in La Liga while winning nothing.
In that context — a trophyless season, managerial disruption, players operating in an unsettled tactical environment — the case for inclusion of Madrid players was weaker than it might otherwise have been. Aurelién Tchouaméni is in the squad but as a French international. Lucas Vázquez, whose form has been limited this season, was not selected. Luka Modric is Croatian and retired from international football several years ago. Federico Valverde, Uruguayan, represents a different nation. Vinícius Júnior plays for Brazil.
The Spain players who might have pressed a case — Álvaro Morata, once a regular starter who has now slipped down the pecking order — was not included. Brahim Díaz plays for Morocco.
De la Fuente’s squad is built around Barcelona (eight players), Athletic Club, Arsenal and PSG. It is the most tactically concentrated Spain squad in recent memory, with a clear positional philosophy shared by the majority of players from their club careers, giving the team a coherent identity that requires less installation time than squads drawn from more varied club environments.
The Group
Spain are in Group H alongside Uruguay, Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde. Comfortable, relative to the quality available, though Uruguay — with Darwin Núñez, Federico Valverde and a defensive organisation built around more than a century of tournament experience — will make the match between the two South American/European giants of Group H the genuine test of Spain’s readiness for what follows.
Saudi Arabia, as the AFC representatives, and Cape Verde, as the CAF entry, will represent different scales of competition but are unlikely to trouble a team of this quality across ninety minutes.
Lamine Yamal at Eighteen
When Spain won Euro 2024, Lamine Yamal was sixteen years and three hundred and sixty-two days old. He was, by three days, the youngest player in the history of UEFA’s flagship international tournament. In the semi-final against France, he scored a goal from outside the area that was so technically precise — the shape of the body, the weight of the contact, the arc of the ball — that it produced the kind of silence in analysts’ rooms that follows something that cannot quite be described in the vocabulary available.
He is now eighteen. He has just completed a season for Barcelona in which he scored twenty-four goals and provided eighteen assists across all competitions, operating predominantly from the right half-space in Hansi Flick’s 4-2-3-1, combining with Raphinha and Ferran Torres and Pedri with a frequency and quality that made the Barcelona attack the most productive in Europe. He was named Kopa Trophy winner in September 2025, confirming what the wider football community had accepted months earlier.
At eighteen, going into a World Cup where the tournament’s best team might be Spain, Yamal is the most closely watched teenager in the world. He plays without the anxiety that usually accompanies that status. He plays as though the pitch is his preferred environment and the pressure of occasion is something that happens to other people.
Rodri’s Return
Rodrigo Hernández Cascante — Rodri — won the Ballon d’Or in October 2024, confirming what his peers had quietly acknowledged for two or three years: that he was the best holding midfielder in the world, the player whose positioning, distribution and defensive intelligence shaped every match he played in more completely than any player in his position since the peak of Andrea Pirlo.
Then he was injured. A serious knee injury in September 2024 kept him out for most of the following season. Manchester City navigated without him — imperfectly, with a title challenge that eventually fell short — and Rodri spent the months of rehabilitation watching what his absence meant to the club he had anchored.
He returned to fitness in the early months of 2026 and has been working himself back to full sharpness in the final weeks before the squad announcement. De la Fuente’s inclusion of Rodri is a statement of faith in his physical readiness, backed by what the City medical staff have confirmed about his recovery. If Rodri is at seventy-five percent of his best, he is still better than almost everyone else in his position. If he can reach ninety percent or above during the tournament — which is possible if the group stage allows managed minutes — Spain have a player whose influence on how their team functions is categorically different in scale from what any other squad can claim.
Martín Zubimendi, who joined Arsenal from Real Sociedad last summer, provides the backup in that holding role — and has had an exceptional season at the Emirates under Arteta, adapting quickly to a pressing system that demands high-tempo contribution from its deepest midfielder. He is not Rodri. He is, however, very good.
The Full Midfield Picture
Pedri, twenty-three, now has a career’s worth of major tournament experience despite still being in the first half of what should be a ten-year period of dominance. He carries the ball through lines in the way that once defined the finest number eights in Spanish football — the Iniesta touch without the Iniesta career interruptions, the ability to receive under pressure and find the progressive pass at pace.
Gavi’s return to the squad after injury is the emotional subplot. He has missed a significant portion of competitive football over the past year and a half due to knee ligament damage, the injury that made Spain’s Euro 2024 victory so bittersweet — won in part because of the template he had helped install, without him available to play in it. His fitness for this tournament, and the degree to which he can recapture the intensity that made him so distinctive, is one of the genuine selection questions Spain will manage across the group stage.
Fabián Ruiz, at PSG, has grown into one of the most complete midfielders in European football — his ability to cover ground, progress the ball and find the final pass in tight spaces making him a different kind of contributor from Pedri or Gavi, and one of the players France will have identified as a key threat following their Euro 2024 semi-final.
Mikel Merino and Martín Zubimendi, both from Arsenal, add a layer of Premier League adaptation and physical intensity. Alex Baena, from Atlético Madrid, provides the energetic, pressing midfielder option that allows De la Fuente to vary his intensity without sacrificing technical quality.
The Forwards
Nico Williams, Athletic Club, is the only forward in this squad who is not a Barcelona product at heart, and his partnership with Yamal — the two of them as the wide attacking pair in a narrow 4-2-3-1, stretching the defence wide while the central runners arrive from depth — has been one of the more devastating combinations in international football since Euro 2024.
Dani Olmo, Spanish-born but developed at Dinamo Zagreb before returning to Spain via Leipzig and then Barcelona, is the shadow striker or second forward in De la Fuente’s system — the player who operates in the space between the opposition’s midfield and defensive lines, the player opponents have most difficulty picking up. His ability to receive the ball while moving, to combine quickly and find the pockets of space that a deep defensive block creates, is the quality that unlocked England in the Euro 2024 final.
Mikel Oyarzabal, at Real Sociedad, provides experienced backup and the option of a technically accomplished centre-forward when the situation demands a more conventional shape. Ferran Torres, at Barcelona, adds the alternative of a winger who can play across both channels. Yeremy Pino, now at Crystal Palace, extends the width options.
The striking depth is the only area where a question exists. Spain do not carry a traditional target forward in the typical sense — their system rarely demands one — but the absence of a penalty-area presence capable of winning aerial duels could, in a difficult knockout match, become relevant.
The Defensive Structure
The back four that Spain will likely deploy — Porro at right back, Grimaldo on the left, García and Cubarsi through the centre — is one of the youngest defensive units at the tournament and one of the most technically accomplished. Pau Cubarsi, nineteen years old at Barcelona, has established himself over the course of the season as one of the most composed centre-backs in European football, his reading of the game and his ability to step out from the defensive line at precisely the correct moment making him exceptional for his age.
Grimaldo, at Leverkusen, provides the left back who functions as a de facto midfielder in possession — his crossing and ability to combine with Nico Williams on the left channel giving the Spanish attack a double width option that creates specific problems for any team trying to compress centrally against their positional game.
The goalkeeper question is, unusually for Spain, a genuine competition for minutes. Unai Simón, at Athletic Club, has been the established number one. David Raya, at Arsenal, has had an extraordinary season — the Zamora Trophy winner from last season, and a key figure in Arsenal’s Champions League campaign. Joan García, the new Zamora winner at Barcelona, is the third option. Spain head into this tournament with perhaps the deepest goalkeeper depth of any squad.
How Spain Win It
Spain are, across the reasonable assessment of the squads available at this tournament, the team that has most successfully converted elite club-level performance into a cohesive national team system. The players who form their core — Yamal, Pedri, Rodri when fit, Williams, Ruiz — play, at the international level, in a way that reflects what they do for their clubs. The positional discipline is embedded rather than installed for the occasion.
The path to the trophy runs through a comfortable group, a round of sixteen that will likely present a mid-ranked South American or Asian opponent, and then quarter-final and semi-final encounters with whichever of France, Germany, England or a dark horse has navigated through the other half of the draw.
Spain’s biggest vulnerability is a version of their old vulnerability: the high line that Flick’s influence has pushed them towards can be punished by the kind of pace on the counter-attack that Vinícius, Mbappé or Kane can provide. If Spain play their best football, they are extremely difficult to contain. If they allow high-intensity opponents to press their high defensive line, the exposed space in behind becomes dangerous.
The Verdict
Spain are the tournament favourites by the most straightforward measure available: their players are in the best collective form of any squad in these twenty-six, the combination of Yamal and Williams is the most difficult wide combination to contain in international football, and Rodri — if he reaches anything approaching his best — gives them a midfield controller whose influence on game flow is decisive.
The no-Madrid fact is the curiosity that will follow this squad through the tournament. In the context of the football being played, it will not matter. What matters is that Lamine Yamal is eighteen and already frightening the world’s best defenders, that Pedri is twenty-three and already carrying the elegance of a player twice his experience, and that Spain last won this trophy sixteen years ago and have spent the intervening years building, slowly and with considerable patience, the team that could do it again.
They look, more than any side at this tournament, like a team that knows exactly what it is doing.