The triumph of La Roja, the queen of world football, as a metaphor for Spain

The Cup and the Crown. The triumph of La Roja, queen of world football, as a metaphor for Spain. A country which, under King Juan Carlos I of Bourbon, laid to rest – with all the honours due to a head of state, it goes without saying – the Caudillo Francisco Franco just over fifty years ago. Only to turn the page immediately. And to ‘move on’ swiftly from a forty-year dictatorship to the current constitutional democracy. It seems like a twist of fate. But ninety minutes of play, plus extra time, highlighted for a global audience the vast gulf between today’s Spain and that of ninety years ago. That is to say, the Spain of the failed coup that sparked the Civil War and an unprecedented wave of fratricidal violence in the country.

Not even Jung could have imagined such a telling coincidence of dates. On 18 July 1936, the Alzamiento – the uprising by generals against the government of the Second Republic – split the country in two. Ninety years later, on 19 July 2026, it is La Roja that unites the nation and crowns its players ‘Reyes del mundo’. And that’s not all. Spain is the first nation to hold both the men’s and women’s World Cup titles simultaneously. They have won everything possible over the last five years: sixteen international UEFA and FIFA titles – with senior and youth teams, including the Under-17s – ten women’s trophies and six men’s. The latter may be fewer in number, but – as always – they carry greater weight in the narrative of the ‘deporte nacional’ and, above all, in the rules of engagement. In men’s football, Spain established itself in 2024 as European champions and as gold medallists at the Paris Olympic Games. An unprecedented dominance in modern football. It came late. After decades of missed opportunities. Between 1950 and 2008, Spain was regarded as a talented but unsuccessful side. With top-tier clubs such as Real Madrid and Barcelona. Yet it was systematically unable to get past the quarter-final hurdle in European or World Cup tournaments. ‘La maldición de cuartos’ (the quarter-final curse), as the Spaniards still say, as if it were a sort of ‘leyenda negra’ (black legend) applied to national football. A popular metaphor, much like the nickname ‘Furia española’ (Spanish Fury) bestowed upon the team when it made its debut at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. La Roja won the silver medal on that occasion. But they played rough. Literally shoving the ball and their opponents into the net. The match was so overwhelming that commentators of the time were reminded of the Sack of Antwerp, which had taken place centuries earlier, in 1576, during the War of the Flanders. They recalled the Spanish soldiers who, starving and mutinous, had laid Antwerp to waste. And they dusted off the term coined by Flemish historians for that episode. ‘De Spaanse Furie’, they wrote. That is to say, the Spanish Fury. The image must have seemed so apt – at least in terms of the style of football – that even the Spaniards began to use it.

Is Ignacio Peyró, a long-standing journalist and writer and director of the Instituto Cervantes in Rome, right? Peyró says that “Spain is a country fixated on the myth of its own decline, more aware of the defeats it has suffered than of the victories it has achieved. A country accustomed to measuring itself against its own failures”. Then, however, he adds that, fortunately, football has changed. “In the space of a generation, we have gone from failure to success. Indeed, to the normalisation of success. Forget the ‘Furia Española’. Our style of play is striking for how refined, rational, composed, patient and skilful it is.” The credit lies with the method: talent and youth academies, known in Spain as ‘canteras’. An almost self-sufficient system of football training and a model of coexistence – transcending ethnic or generational boundaries – which is already applied to the young players selected by the clubs. The quintessential ‘canterano’ is, of course, national team manager Luis de la Fuente. He started out at Athletic Club in Bilbao, one of the strictest canteras in the world, where only players of Basque origin or who have been trained in the Basque Country play. The Spanish call him “Luis de la Gente”. And it is not hard to see why. Luis de la Fuente is the perfect product of the system that has transformed Spanish football. A home-grown professional who knows the federation’s model inside out.

One had to witness the celebrations in Madrid on the night of the final against Argentina, played at MetLife Stadium in New York. The roar that erupted when striker Ferran Torres broke through the Argentine defense. The decisive goal secured Spain’s second World Cup title in history, following their victory in 2010. More than a million Spaniards poured into the streets, gathering at the usual spots for celebrating football triumphs and/or national celebrations: the Puerta del Sol, Calle de Alcalá, and the Paseo de Recoletos, which links Plaza de Cibeles with Plaza Colón. Two squares that symbolise the capital. At Cibeles, the fountain dedicated to the Magna Mater seems to blend into the crowd that surrounds the royal carriage and the turreted goddess holding the keys to the city in an embrace. In the square dedicated to Christopher Columbus – a ‘national’ hero in every sense; try telling anyone that the navigator was actually born in Genoa – the Rojigualda flutters: an enormous flag, measuring around three hundred square metres, chosen as the symbol of the state following the adoption of the Constitution in 1978, three years after Franco’s death.

They called it the Constitution of Concord. It was approved by the Spanish people via a referendum. Today, Felipe VI is its guarantor. It is he, in his role, who represents the unity of the country. Just as with La Roja, if I may say so. The King will not take offence at the comparison. He is La Roja’s number one fan. Perhaps because he is a sportsman through and through, having competed as an Olympic sailor at the 1992 Barcelona Games. Perhaps because he is aware of just how much sport serves as the ideal unifying force for a country facing strong separatist pressures. Certainly, it is no coincidence that Felipe VI chose to feature in the video with which the Federation announced, at the end of May, the list of 26 players selected by Luis de la Fuente. The video – three minutes you absolutely mustn’t miss – features images and scenes that represent the country in all its variety and complexity, including the memory of those who are no longer with us. It serves to reiterate that in every corner of the country, in even the most remote part of the nation, when La Roja plays, anyone who feels Spanish plays too. Bakers, fishermen, judges and street cleaners, teachers and scientists, artists and taxi drivers, booksellers and chefs all contribute to the country’s progress. Everyone, in every corner of the country, shares a passion. “I am the team, I am Spain,” concludes the King.

It really was a sight to behold: the sea of people who, on the night of 19 July, flooded the streets and squares of the town, dressed in the colours of the Rojigualda. The same red – albeit without the yellow – was worn by Queen Letizia, the heir to the throne Leonor, Princess of Asturias, and her sister, Infanta Sofia, who watched the final in New York alongside King Felipe VI. They were cheering them on enthusiastically. Especially the King. He couldn’t sit still. He was rejoicing. And he was suffering. Just like Sandro Pertini, Italy’s most beloved president of all time, during the only World Cup final I’ve ever seen up close. The legendary Italy v Germany match of 1982 at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in Madrid. I swear I still have the ticket somewhere, signed by Cabrini.

Needless to say, it was only in the Basque Country that there were disturbances. Over twenty people were arrested or are under investigation for intimidation or threats against fans who were celebrating. In Bilbao, in Biscay, a group of hardline, hooded separatists tried to smash the giant screen installed by the Partido Popular in Doña Casilda’s private park so that people could watch the World Cup final together. They failed thanks to the intervention of a woman, Esther Martínez, a local councillor at odds with the Basque Nationalist Party which governs the city. It was she who stood in their way before the police intervened and used her own body to protect ‘the freedom to be equal to the rest of Spain’. Flags were burnt and young people wearing La Roja shirts were attacked in the province of Gipuzkoa too, on the border between Spain and France – a veritable stronghold of Bildu, the Marxist party campaigning for the independence of the Basque Country, which props up Pedro Sánchez’s current government and its narrow parliamentary majority. Bildu’s secretary, Arnaldo Otegi – who has been sentenced to prison five times in the past for his membership of ETA, the Basque terrorist group that has plunged the country into bloodshed – spoke out only on the occasion of the France v Spain semi-final on 14 July. “Neither with France nor with Spain,” he declared. “We Basques want our own national team. We can only support the team that wins the other semi-final, be it England or Argentina.” Then he fell silent. Of course, he must have realised that, in the meantime, 83.6 per cent of the inhabitants of the Basque Country had watched the World Cup final live, mostly tuning in to TVE’s first channel – the Spanish equivalent of RaiUno, as state-run as you can imagine.

On the other hand, this Spanish national team is very ‘Basque’, starting with striker Nico Williams of Athletic Bilbao. Nico ‘fast-footed’ Williams, with Rasta braids flitting about his head and feet that can dribble even through thin air, was born in Pamplona in 2002, the son of Ghanaian migrants who arrived in Spain after travelling on foot across half of Africa. Step by step, from the equatorial sands of the Gulf of Guinea to Morocco and on to Melilla, the Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean Sea. He is the player who moved a global audience with a gesture that, for him, may be worth more than the victory itself. Nico waited until the end of the medal ceremony. Then he quickly crossed the pitch to take his newly won gold medal to his mum, who was sitting in the stands. A tribute to the woman who crossed the Sahara whilst pregnant to give her children a future. And she succeeded brilliantly. They are both outstanding footballers.

They are the faces of the ‘new’ Spain. Alongside Lamine Yamal, the Barcelona prodigy, born in Catalonia in 2007 to a Moroccan father and a mother originally from Equatorial Guinea. He is the most talked-about star of the World Cup. The youngster, as fast as the wind, who, invited to La Zarzuela, the royal family’s private residence, sought refuge in the arms of Felipe VI, in defiance of protocol. The King returned the gesture with infinite tenderness. The teenager with his four-year-old little brother always in tow, the chubby mascot of La Roja. Alongside Real Madrid defender Marc Cucurella, who after every match rushes to hug his autistic son and doesn’t cut his hair so that his son can recognise him on the pitch. And, last but not least, captain Rodri, a thirty-year-old from Madrid. The man who, during the awards ceremony in New York, asked President Trump to step aside and make room for an all-Spanish photo.

The Cup and the Crown. Why Leonor is also in this family photograph. The princess who is training to be queen with the same discipline and tenacity with which her peers in La Roja have trained to become Reyes del mundo. Leonor, who flew to New York on her own. As heir to the throne, legitimised by the Oath to the Constitution in 2023 before the Cortes assembled in plenary session, she can stand in for her father at any time and for any purpose, even temporarily, but she cannot travel with him for reasons of security and protocol. How far she has come, that very fair-haired little girl who, in 2010, at the age of four, together with her younger sister Sofia, clutched Spain’s first World Cup trophy in her hands. Now Leonor is ‘the people’s princess’ of the Bourbons of Spain. The future of the dynasty. The daily newspaper El País, Spain’s most authoritative publication, praises her. Because she “embodies the best of her generation: the value of study and preparation, and a vocation for service”. It is fortunate that she has accepted the burden of a life to be led in an exemplary manner and a rigorous upbringing. Three years of military service, in the army, navy and air force, just like her father Felipe and her grandfather Juan Carlos. But she alone, as a woman, has obtained a fighter-paratrooper’s licence. She has thus become the first member of the Spanish royal family to complete a military parachuting course and jump from a flying aircraft. Having completed her military service, Leonor will return to university in September. She has enrolled at Carlos III University in Madrid, one of Spain’s most prestigious public universities. She will attend the Getafe campus, on the outskirts of the capital. Just like any other twenty-year-old Spanish woman.

This is the arena in which the future of the Spanish Crown is being played out. In a country riven by territorial tensions, social polarisation and an ever-increasing disillusionment with politics, the monarchy can only survive if it continues to fulfil the role assigned to it by the Constitution: to act as an impartial balancing force. An institution that does not govern, but guarantees the continuity of the state and the coexistence of different identities. When Leonor completes her studies in law and social sciences, the time will come for a new World Cup. To be held in Spain, Morocco and Portugal. Two kingdoms and a republic.