Why do world champions Spain have so little Euros pedigree?

Yahoo

18 hours ago

Spain arrived at Euro 2025 as world champions, UEFA Nations League title holders and one of the favourites — and promptly hammered Portugal 5-0 and Belgium 6-2 in their first two group-stage games. And yet, as they prepare to face host nation Switzerland in the quarter-finals on Friday, they will know this is the stage at which they have been eliminated from each of the past three European Championships.
Thanks to their own successes in those other competitions and what the country's leading club side Barcelona have achieved in the Women's Champions League when fielding a team packed with Spanish internationals, Spain are always considered one of the teams to beat these days. But it has not always been that way, and their pedigree in this particular tournament tells a very different story.
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Put simply, Spain have a love-hate relationship with the Euros.
It is the first major tournament they ever qualified for, in 1997, but also the one that sparked the biggest rebellion in Spanish women's football. They have only made it to the finals five times in 13 attempts and reached the semis just once, with that feat achieved on their debut 28 years ago, when only eight teams were involved.
Such was the nature of the women's game in Spain back then that few people expected them to get to the tournament, co-hosted by Norway and Sweden, including the players themselves — Roser Serra, their first-choice goalkeeper, had bought tickets to see Oasis in concert instead.
Spain's women's team didn't play their first match until 1983, too late to even be involved in trying to qualify for the first Euros the following year. Attempts to get to the 1987, 1989 and 1991 editions of the tournament did not go well, with three wins in a combined 20 games. In 1993 and 1995, they came closer, finishing second in their groups at a time when only the top team made it through.
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After that last-four appearance in 1997, they fell short again in 2001, 2005 and 2009 before making it to Euro 2013 in epic fashion. In the second leg of a play-off against Scotland, having drawn 1-1 away in the first leg, Veronica Boquete scored the decisive goal of a 3-2 win in the final minute of extra time in Madrid.
'That remains the best moment of my career, the most exciting one,' Boquete says. 'All of us who were there still remember it. It was a turning point for women's football in Spain. Qualifying for that Euro gave Spanish women's football a huge boost.'
Boquete is considered the first big star to emerge in the women's game in Spain.
'We didn't live the 1997 Euro,' she adds. 'And I say we didn't live it because there was no media coverage of the tournament. The format was also different; it was a time when no one knew anything about women's football.'
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In the group stage of that 2013 tournament in Sweden, they beat England 3-2 (on a stoppage-time goal from a 19-year-old named Alexia Putellas), lost 1-0 to France and drew 1-1 with Russia — enough to go through to the knockout phase in second place, where they were beaten 3-1 by Norway, the eventual runners-up.
'Reaching the quarter-finals earned us respect,' Boquete continues. 'When you're in the final stages of a European Championship, everyone knows you've had to do something to get there. Until then, it was very difficult for people to believe that Spain could beat any other team.
'But it's also true that then you remember we hardly had any friendly matches, we were staying in hotels located in industrial estates next to petrol stations… we didn't have the same facilities as other teams to recover quickly, and we had a fairly limited staff.
'I have fond memories of being part of that team, but also bad memories of thinking what could have been if everything around us had been better.'
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By 2017, Spain's women were becoming a different proposition. It had been two years since Barcelona Femeni turned professional and other leading Spanish clubs were beginning to show a stronger commitment to the women's game, too.
In the interim, there was an event that changed the course of the national team. After the 2015 World Cup, in Canada, the players stood up against the side's coach of 27 years, Ignacio Quereda. They complained of harassment and unprofessional treatment. The RFEF, the Spanish federation, brought in Jorge Vilda as his replacement.
Come Euro 2017 in the Netherlands, Spain were again eliminated in the quarter-finals, but in surprising fashion as they lost to tournament debutants Austria on penalties following a goalless draw. Marta Corredera took Spain's last penalty in that shootout. Silvia Meseguer had missed the third one and while Corredera scored the fourth, it was not enough.
'They were a beatable opponent on paper,' says Corredera. 'But things didn't go well. We weren't up to the task. We didn't know how to react to different situations in the match, either on the pitch or from the bench. We left with the feeling that we could have done more.'
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By this stage, at least things were getting better for the players off the pitch than in Sweden four years earlier.
'For the World Cup in 2015, the preparation was much better,' Corredera reflects. 'We played friendly matches, the plane trip was better… everything improved. We noticed an improvement in training, planning… an evolution that in the end was what we had asked for.
'We had it very clear in our minds that, once we were on a level playing field in terms of gym training and physical work, we would surely be superior, because we were already technically far ahead of the other teams.'
And then came Euro 2022 — one of the most important moments in Spanish women's football as it sparked another rebellion.
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The commitment to women's football in Spain had gained momentum, with Barcelona winning their first Champions League title in 2021. There was also a first Spanish winner of the Ballon d'Or Feminin that year in Putellas. However, the Barca midfielder ended up suffering an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) knee injury in training the day before the tournament in England began, and she was much missed when Spain's challenge began.
This generation of players was the best the country had ever had, drawing heavily on that established Barcelona team. Standout names included Sandra Panos, Mapi Leon, Irene Paredes, Aitana Bonmati, Mariona Caldentey, Patri Guijarro and Ona Batlle, who was then playing for Manchester United. In the starting XI chosen by Vilda for the biggest games, more than half the players were supplied by Barca.
Through to the quarter-finals again, they faced the hosts. Leading 1-0 with seven minutes of the 90 to go, Spain conceded an equaliser, then the winner after the tie went into extra time. The problem was not losing to a team as strong as England, who went on to lift the trophy. It was that the players felt they were not put in the best position by their coach to be able to deal with that situation.
This is just one example among many other factors that caused them to snap. They felt the RFEF was not a professional organisation.
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'We went to England to win, but we saw that our desire and ambition did not match the expectations of the coaching staff or the RFEF,' Caldentey wrote in her book, How We Changed History.
'Against England, we were playing one of the best games of the national team. We were dominating England, and winning, but then Vilda ordered a change of approach to preserve the result, which was completely counter-productive. We don't know how to defend results. Our identity is to have the ball and look at the opponent's goal.
'The icing on the cake was the final message: that we had played well, that we were good, that it was a shame because we deserved to win. Well, no, I don't buy that. Maybe we needed to think that there are things we need to improve and stop navel-gazing so much.'
Vilda had been in charge of the team for seven years by then but had been unable to win a single knockout match in an official competition. And yet he got a two-year contract extension before those Euros. This sent a clear message to the players that it did not matter how they performed in England, he would remain in charge regardless. They felt this would be inconceivable with the country's men's team.
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The players wanted Vilda dismissed. They discussed this internally, but the content of their meetings was leaked to the media, accompanied by the RFEF's refusal to respond to their requests. Then, 15 players sent identical emails saying they could not report if called up for Spain duty until there were changes at the federation.
Almost instantly, those 15 statements were made public and a war between those players and the RFEF began. The 15 were accompanied by three team-mates who, despite not sending an email like they did, had shown their support on social media — Irene Paredes, Putellas and Jenni Hermoso.
They went months without being picked for Spain, until the first signs of rapprochement began to appear. Some asked to return, others did not. Of the 15, only three ended up going to the 2023 World Cup: Bonmati, Caldentey and Batlle.
Spain won that World Cup despite the internal divisions and the little preparation they had been able to do as a group with the new additions — Paredes, Putellas and Hermoso were also there — and what ended up burying the RFEF's leadership came during the celebrations after the final.
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Federation president Luis Rubiales kissed Hermoso on the lips during the trophy and medals presentation ceremony without her consent in an incident that transcended sport, before an infamous press conference in which he said he would not resign and spoke of 'false feminism', which led all Spanish female footballers to declare themselves ineligible for the national team until those responsible for what had happened left their roles.
Hermoso reported him, Rubiales eventually resigned and it all ended in a trial where he was found guilty of sexual assault.
The rest is history but the seeds of these major issues, which for the first time had international support for the players, had really come to the fore 12 months earlier at the European Championship.
Three years later, with much less media hype than before, Spain are back at the Euros, as favourites.
They have come an awful long way since 1997.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Spain, Women's Soccer, Women's Euros
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