A new prince leads Spain as it rules European soccer again

BERLIN — First, Spain’s players had to perform the rituals of celebration. They communed with their fans. They draped themselves with a selection of flags, national and regional. They commiserated with their bereft English opponents. Once those were completed, they gathered by the podium hastily constructed on the field at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.

Most of the players took that moment to compose themselves, to share an embrace, to try to absorb the scale of their achievement over the past month: At the start of Euro 2024, Spain stood in the second rank of continental powers. Now, after a flawless tournament and a 2-1 triumph over England in the final Sunday, the country sits at the pinnacle once more.

Lamine Yamal could not contain himself, however. He danced and bounced, unable to stop moving. He knew, though not from firsthand experience, that each and every player would get chance to lift the trophy, so he made sure to practice his technique, heaving an imaginary cup three times.

When Spain’s players were eventually summoned to receive their prize, Yamal went a little too early. The assembled dignitaries were not yet in place when he scampered onstage. He had to be called back by his teammates — greeted not with censure but an affectionate, somewhat paternal ruffle of the hair.

It has been easy over the past few weeks to forget quite how young Yamal is. Only 16 years old for most of the tournament, he is so young that German law requires that he have special dispensation to work late in the evening. He is so young that he has had a designated guardian with him at all times. He is so young that, standing by the podium, he could probably taste the cake he was given to celebrate his 17th birthday Saturday.

And yet, despite his youth, Yamal can claim a large portion of the credit for taking a relatively unheralded Spanish side to a largely unanticipated glory. It was his goal that turned the semifinal with France on Tuesday. It was his pass that created Spain’s opening strike in Sunday’s final, turned home by Nico Williams.

Mikel Oyarzabal might have scored the goal that sealed Spain’s victory, and the imperious Rodri might have been selected as the tournament’s outstanding player, but it was Yamal — his youth, his verve, that thrilling unpredictability that is the exclusive preserve of the prodigy — who provided the energy that has come to define this side.

That energy has proved infectious. A survey, conducted by 40bD and published Sunday in the Spanish newspaper El País, found that as many as 87% of Spaniards planned to watch the final. The national airline, Iberia, had promised anxious customers that planes flying at high altitude during the match would broadcast the game.

That can be attributed, in part, to the fact that this team is more representative of Spain than has sometimes been the case. Yamal is of Moroccan descent; he grew up in a neighborhood in the Catalan town of Mataro that has been demonized by Vox, the country’s surging far-right populist party.

Williams’ parents, meanwhile, immigrated from Ghana. Oyarzabal, like a substantial portion of the rest of the squad, is proudly Basque, something that was no doubt a factor in helping the patriotic fervor engendered by the team’s success spread to those parts of Spain where separatist sentiment remains high. Big screens had been erected in both the Basque Country and Catalunya, hardly the Spanish national team’s heartlands, allowing fans to watch the final.

But perhaps more immediately, Yamal has served to reinvigorate how Spanish soccer sees itself. It is more than a decade now since the country’s greatest side — possibly the finest international team the sport has ever known — lifted the last of its major trophies, a second European championship in 2012.

Since then, Spain has known little but disappointment. Its men’s team has not won a knockout game at the World Cup since its victory in the final in 2010. It had won only two at the European Championship in that period. Its soccer authorities have been embroiled in a scandal that threatened to overshadow the sole glory in that period, Spain’s lifting of the Women’s World Cup last year.

Now, though, its men’s team have an honor to add to the country’s women’s triumph. “Today is a great day for Spanish sport,” said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who was in Berlin, watching beside Spanish King Felipe VI and his youngest daughter, Princess Sofía. A few hours earlier, Carlos Alcaraz had claimed his second Wimbledon trophy.

Spain’s soccer glory, of course, was England’s suffering. Gareth Southgate’s team had reached Berlin in a strange mood, unsure how to parse a month in which it had not lost a game, developed a useful habit of rescuing itself from crises of its own making and qualified for a first final on foreign soil — but also played well for a grand total of about 45 minutes.

Still, England seemed to have settled on the idea that perhaps the stars had aligned, that while Southgate’s unapologetic pragmatism might not be aesthetically pleasing, it delivered. The prospect of no longer having to calculate the increasingly complicated math of how many years of hurt the country was enduring hovered, closer than ever. Football was perhaps about to come home.

And, in a way, it did. It had just changed address. Spain’s men’s national team might have endured a fallow period in the last decade or so, but the country’s teams have not. Since 2001, Spanish men’s teams — either the international version or its clubs — have faced foreign opponents 23 times in major finals. They have won all of them.

Spanish influence, meanwhile, is visible almost everywhere. Real Madrid has essentially made the Champions League its private property. The best manager in the Premier League is Spanish. So is the second best. Spanish managers won league titles in France and Germany this year, too. Many of the ideas that fire the style of play that has become dominant across Europe’s elite teams have at least some of its roots in Spain.

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