Spain vs England: a clash of our footballing age

The two countries have reshaped the modern game. How does it turn out?

English and Spanish football once existed as polar opposites of each other. Everything about the English game – its physicality, its rigidity, its long balls and its overall attitude - seemed to be contrasted so much by those intricate rondos the Spaniards loved. But these days, I’m not sure they’re so different.

La Liga has long been dominated by Real Madrid and Barcelona. If you are a Spanish player, your first choice since forever has always been to go to one of those clubs. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon. But if you don’t make the cut at either of those sides, financial reality kicks in. You can still get paid like a Real or Barça star without playing there. All you have to do is move to the Premier League.

Of Spain’s likely starting lineup in the final, four players (Aymeric Laporte, Marc Cucurella, Rodri and Álvaro Morata) have experienced Premier League football. In some ways that’s much less than the Spanish influence on England. That same financial reality exists for managers as much as it does for players. Of England’s expected lineup, six (Jordan Pickford, Kyle Walker, John Stones, Bukayo Saka and Phil Foden) have played under Spanish managers, with apologies to Pep Guardiola for describing him as such. Add in Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham and that’s a clear majority of the side with at least a bit of Spanish influence.

English football has gone through, by my count, three major waves of Spanish (yes, Pep, I know of and support Catalan independence, but just give me this article, ok?) coaching influence. The first started when Rafa Benítez took over Liverpool in 2004. It’s funny in hindsight how much criticism he got for his controversial approaches like “rotation” and “zonal marking on set pieces”. He didn’t do himself many favours with his functional football and often cold personality, but he really did help change English football. His emphasis on vertical compactness, and more of a mid-block as opposed to defending deep, would shape the Premier League for a long time.

Both the second and third waves were about Guardiola. The second wave happened years before he got hired by Manchester City. Barcelona and Spain winning everything triggered a global obsession with short passing football, and England was no exception. “As English football broadened its horizons”, Michael Cox wrote in his book The Mixer, “actually participating in the Premier League was no longer a prerequisite for becoming a major influence on it”. In that run at the start of the 2010s, you’d put Sky Sports on to watch some tactically incoherent nonsense as Premier League sides would leave huge gaps in midfield for opponents to attack into. Then in the evening, Sky would switch to showing La Liga and the football felt like it came from a different planet, such was the sophistication. They were everything we weren’t.

So we copied Spanish football. We played a more technical short passing game. We used our financial advantages to import some of their best creative midfielders (think David Silva or Santi Cazorla). Everyone had to get onboard with tiki-taka. In the process, we missed the whole thing: structure. It took Guardiola himself coming to these shores before anyone noticed. If Benítez pushed for better structure without the ball, then Guardiola really pioneered structure with the ball. It wasn’t about a million passes and #skillz at all. It was about players staying in their position to create better options on the ball and manipulate the space to work good chances. That’s what all those passes were about.

In all fairness, the Spanish national team wasn’t exactly quick to notice this. As I feel like I’ve written about every time watching Spain, they’ve long been far too conservative in possession, much more than Guardiola ever would be. That’s finally changing now by properly embracing the principles of positional play and being more direct. They’ve always got direct wide players on both flanks in this tournament and that creates the space for everything to happen. Those wingers can run at defenders in a way that doesn’t feel “Spanish”, and that most English fans would probably prefer their team started doing a bit more often.

England still haven’t learned that lesson at all. Yes, we now have some very good players who have been academy coached to be comfortable in possession and fluid in terms of changing position. But the structure is still poor. Players are coming inside and occupying the same zones without anyone really trying to stretch the play. England have done it. They’ve become Spain. They’ve just become the disappointing version from 2014-22 that passed the ball sideways an awful lot because no one was making a run and stretching the game.

So what does that mean for the final? I should stress that, as much as Spain look like a much more coherent football team, England have the better individual quality here. Ignore what you’ve watched for the past month. Thinking about the likely starting lineups, on club performances, how many Spaniards would get into the England side? You’d take Unai Simón over Pickford. Cucurella would play purely on the grounds of being an actual left back. Rodri would be the perfect passing midfielder to sit next to Rice. But I’m honestly not sure anyone else would start. Yes, Lamine Yamal has looked exciting, but would you take him right now over a 22-year-old Bukayo Saka? Is Nico Williams actually better than Phil Foden? England’s raw talent is on another level.

And yet we all expect the Three Lions to ride their luck against a Spain team likely to dominate. I’m thinking about whether they should play a back four to keep those wingers from coming inside, or stick to the 3-4-3 and make use of a man advantage in midfield. If I was Spanish, I’d have plenty of faith in the team simply playing their normal game. England are going to be doing a job against Spain despite the talent advantage. I’d love to say I’m confident, but I’m not.

Even if they don’t have anything like the quality of those previous title-winning sides, this Spain team feels like the evolution of the theory of Spanish football. They’ve figured out how to add the things they lacked into the overall framework of how the national team always plays football. We still don’t have a theory of English football. There isn’t an idea about football that binds Eddie Howe, Sean Dyche, Gary O’Neill and Graham Potter. Maybe this doesn’t matter. Maybe you can win without finding the answer to that question. But it’s still something I’m looking for. Whatever the result in the final, I’ll still be searching for English football’s core idea.

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By the time you’re reading this, it will either be late on Saturday night or some time on Sunday. Maybe it’s far in the future, in which case, why are you reading about a football match that already happened years ago? You do you. But I’m writing this on Saturday the 13th July, 2024. It’s a momentous date, because I’ve now officially been taking hormones for a whole year.

To call it life-changing would be an understatement. Everything I wrote up until a year ago had an underlying tinge of suicidal ideation that just isn’t there anymore. I can feel actual joy for the first time in my life. My life is not all the way where I want it to be right now. I knew I would be busy with the Euros over this past month or so, and I deliberately pushed a lot of transition goals back until after then. But I can finally see a version of what I want my life to look like. I can see a shape of where I want to be in five years and think “yes, that’s a plan”. I’ve never felt that way before. I’ve never not been going through the motions until right now. I want to be alive now.

All of this happens in the backdrop of a world, and a country, that is, let’s say, not great towards trans women. And yet it’s still the best thing that ever happened to me. I see this line of thinking, among people who would probably consider themselves supportive, that trans people deserve love and respect, but it’s ultimately a regrettable outcome that thankfully isn’t that many people. And I just think that’s bullshit! It took me a long time to get there, but I’ve finally reached a point where I don’t constantly wish I had been a cis woman. I am proud of who I am. And it breaks my heart to think that people are out there, ghosting through their lives, scared to take that step that I was once afraid to make.

People have reached out to me about being trans in the past and I’ve been very bad at it. But something happened in my brain this past year, and I had a moment of realisation that I can do this now. I can be supportive to people. Genuinely, if anyone ever has any gender feelings they’re trying to work through, hit me up at grace.r.2187@gmail.com, or somewhere else on the internet, and we can talk (and if you live in my awful country and feel paralysed at the barriers to healthcare, err, maybe we can talk about that, too). I can help anyone get out of the same situation I was in, I’ll feel like I did good in the world.

Anyway, enjoy the final, I just had to say my piece.