Spain at the 2014 World Cup: What Went Wrong?

Old and slow

Welcome to another one of these retrospectives, on teams that were widely expected to be serious contenders in previous tournaments, but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t happen at all. What went wrong? What are the key takeaways? Can we learn important things about how sides should approach the World Cup? I think these failures should tell us just as much as the success stories.

Previous editions: France 2002, Brazil 2006, Argentina 2010

Spanish football was all-conquering for a minute there.

You could see the seeds planted in 2006, when a team of exciting youngsters couldn’t quite make it click with the veterans. Two years later, though, the new guard had fully taken over the side and won Euro 2008 with some really exciting football on display.

2008 was probably the best Spain team of this era, but it’s not really the one you think of. At the same time that La Roja were showcasing their talents in Austria, a certain Pep Guardiola was preparing for his first preseason as manager of the Barcelona senior side. His structured possession game was about to take over the world with a core of Spain-eligible players (and some bloke called Lionel Messi). The national team, under Vicente del Bosque, inevitably copied this approach to great success. In truth, the Spain version was always slower and more negative than the Barcelona variant. Barcelona passed the ball to create space and goalscoring chances. Spain, it felt like, passed the ball to kill games off and keep a clean sheet.

This approach won the 2010 World Cup, and then it delivered Euro 2012 with largely the same group of players. But 2014 was a new test. The players were a little older. The tiki-taka approach was showing signs of weakness at club level. A year earlier, Spain had been demolished at the 2013 Confederations Cup final. Whereas they felt like obvious frontrunners in the three previous tournaments, it was a little dicier this time.