The headline in Monday’s Marca summed up the delirious joy that had greeted Spain’s Euro 2024 triumph the night before, a triumph that brought the country a record fourth men’s European Championship title. “¡¡¡Somos los reyes de Europa!!!” bellowed the sports paper – “We’re the Kings of Europe!!!”
As many commentators noted, Luis de la Fuente’s team had finally, and unequivocally, found the form that had propelled their illustrious predecessors to victory. “La Roja has rediscovered the thread of the play that led it to its golden years,” said David Álvarez in El País.
“And not only that: after rediscovering the thread, it has continued to build on it, with the same exquisite talent, with a torrent of energy, and with a formidable faith that can endure any moment of doubt or setback. It works, it resists and it kills – even if it loses its lighthouse, Rodri – the player of the tournament, who retired injured after only 45 minutes. And all this has been crowned by the dizzying pace revealed in Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams, who are set, frictionlessly, within the old machinery of control.”
In El Mundo, Abraham P Romero said – as did others – that England had been comprehensively outplayed. “Eternal glory” was Spain’s reward, while England’s was yet another bitter dollop of “eternal tragedy”. The last 45 minutes, said Romero, had revealed the gulf between the sides.
“The start of the second half was a Shakespearean tragedy,” he wrote. “England, incapable of anything, yielded before a superior Spain and only some unwise Spanish decisions avoided a hammering. The injury suffered by Spain’s helmsman, Rodri, made little difference: the Premier stars found themselves kneeling before a Spanish generation that is afraid of nothing.”
José Samano was similarly exultant in El Periódico, contrasting Spain’s “hymn to football” with a “hermetic” England. “Spain kicked the football into its inventor’s face and ascended to the Euro throne for the fourth time – a unique feat,” he said.
“No one had any need to show off because no rival possessed greater charm than Luis de la Fuente’s team. Never was there a more goalscoring champion, nor a winner with seven consecutive victories – four of them against world champions.”
ABC’s José Carlos Carabias was among those who paid tribute to “a team that represents the plural, diverse and integrated Spain of 2024” – one featuring young players, such as Lamine Yamal and Williams, who were born in Spain to parents from abroad.
“The Spanish team mixes a cocktail of footballers from different backgrounds and leagues that offer a snapshot of the world in our time: families that move from place to place, immigrants in search of a future with a little prosperity, exchanges of nationality on a spinning planet and ID cards that shouldn’t discriminate against anyone’s origin,” he wrote.
Much of the attention fell on Lamine Yamal – the youngest player to participate, and score, in a men’s Euros, and on Williams. Marco Schwartz, writing in elDiario.es, recognised the representational weight the two players have found themselves carrying because of their heritage and because of the time and society in which they live.
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“We’d all like Nico and Lamine to only, and exclusively, symbolise the magic of football,” he said. “And that’s what would happen in a normal world. But it has turned out to be inevitable that in turbulent times that are charged with racism and xenophobia, the two young sportsmen have acquired a political significance they did not seek.
“The pair who know very well what’s at stake away from the football field, have accepted their new status with ease and even pride – just as [Kylian] Mbappé accepted it when he asked French people not to vote for Marine Le Pen.”
La Vanguardia’s Luis Buxeres also placed the two at the very centre of Spain’s victory. “The Spain that won in Berlin was the Spain of Lamine Yamal and of Nico Williams, the Spain of smiles, the Spain of family, the invincible Spain,” he wrote.
There then followed a little gloating – complete with a very pointed reference to the great, and apparently unforgotten, showdown of 1588. “England will have to find a new Sir Francis Drake to sink the Spanish fleet, now that Spain – which has won the Nations League and the Euros in the space of just a year – threatens to dominate the seas of international football just as Phillip II’s fleet ruled the waves five centuries ago,” said Buxeres.
“Fifty-eight years have now passed since England last seized some booty, and it will have to go on waiting to enjoy the sport it so lovingly invented.”