Spain seek to erase pain of World Cup final fallout with Euro 2025 glory | Jonathan Liew | OneFootball

For England, the last World Cup final remains a kind of open wound. The mistake by Lucy Bronze that allowed Olga Carmona to score the only goal of the game; Lauren Hemp hitting the crossbar; the opportunities not taken; the surges of momentum not rewarded; the sense of a golden inheritance slipping inexorably through their fingers. For the players who remain, and for coach Sarina Wiegman, Sunday’s European Championship final offers a chance for redemption.

If all this is normal and regular enough, then what is perhaps more unusual is that much of the above is also true for their victorious opponents.

Restitution, revenge, a chance to erase painful memories, a collective resolve that this moment will not be taken from them, the chance to secure a meaningful legacy: these will be the stakes for Spain in Basel. Winning the World Cup in 2023 was a monumental achievement immediately tarnished by the actions of their federation. This final, by contrast, feels like more of a clean slate.

Spain should win. They have been the outstanding team of the tournament so far, effortlessly gifted on the ball, ruthlessly disciplined without it, adding layers of complexity to their famous passing game, defending gallantly when the situation has demanded it. There has also been a sense of quietly building momentum not just in the tournament but through the year as a whole: pieces falling into place, players becoming more and more comfortable in their roles.

But as Montse Tomé’s players have consistently made clear, Spain are competing for more than trophies. The bitter legal and public battles fought with their federation, the RFEF, are part of a longer struggle for recognition and equality, for respect and dignity. After all, if the greatest moment of their careers could be so cruelly taken from them, then what ultimately was the point of it?

The 2023 World Cup was not the unifying moment for Spanish football that it could have been. Fifteen players had quit the national team before the tournament; three ultimately returned, and so for a squad marooned on the other side of the world, loyalties split between their present task and their absent comrades, a begrudging truce had been maintained with their disliked coach Jorge Vilda and the suits above him. It was a fragile show of unity, maintained only by their quest for a first major trophy. Once it had been secured, all hell broke loose.

In hindsight, the unwanted kiss that Luis Rubiales planted on the lips of Jenni Hermoso was simply the trigger. The unresolved issues and grievances within Spanish football had lain unresolved for decades, and probably would not have been purged in any other way. The actions of Rubiales himself were egregious enough; what really hurt was the way the mechanisms of power and influence instinctively mobilised to protect him.

Hermoso was urged to appear in a video publicly defending him, and after she refused, a statement insisting the kiss was consensual was written and published by the federation without her knowledge. “While the world has seen this, attitudes like this have been part of our team’s daily life for years,” she wrote on social media.

When Rubiales finally resigned in an interview with Piers Morgan, having blamed “false feminism” for the storm of protest against him, he did so not out of genuine remorse or contrition but – as he admitted – out of a desire not to hamper Spain’s bid for the 2030 men’s World Cup. A Spanish court found him guilty of sexual assault in February, and after ignoring an appeal from prosecutors who sought a jail sentence, fined him all of about £9,000.

Has anything really changed? Rubiales is gone, as are many of the figures around him when he was at the RFEF. Vilda was sacked after the tournament, and will take charge of Morocco in Saturday’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations final. But the moment they shared and the platform it could have provided: they have gone forever.

Keira Walsh was a Barcelona player at the time and saw first hand how the Lionesses effect of 2022 summarily failed to materialise in Spain in 2023. “The way our league jumped after we won the Euros, if you compare it to Spain it probably wasn’t the same,” she said this week. “After the game there was a lot of controversy and I don’t think enough spotlight on how incredibly they played.” But of course the enduring excellence of this Spanish generation is that it can always generate more opportunities. Bronze remembers playing training games at Barcelona and encountering “like, clones and clones and clones of these amazing, technical, intelligent players”. And the 11 who will take the field against England on Sunday are the very best of them.

It is not just the World Cup fallout for which Spain are trying to atone. Twelve months later they travelled to Paris as the overwhelming favourites for Olympic gold, only to be stunned 4-2 by Brazil in the semi-finals after a performance littered with defensive errors. They didn’t even win bronze, Germany beating them in the third-place playoff. The goalkeeper Cata Coll was inconsolable afterwards, but here has talked about how “life has given us a second chance”.

This is a better team than 12 months ago, arguably a better team than two years ago, “like a steamroller” as Carmona describes them, albeit with an occasional habit of getting stuck in neutral. Capitalising on these fleeting passages is England’s best hope of upsetting the odds, picking their moments to attack, using their press and their physicality and their technical ability to rattle Spain off their game.

And perhaps, for a country for so long indifferent to women’s football, where the sport was banned until 1980, where the women’s team have often been treated as an afterthought, Spain can finally enjoy their moment in the spotlight. There are big screens being erected across the country, from the Parque de Berlín in Madrid to the Plaza del Pilar in Gran Canaria. This is a team united and content again, longing above all for a chance to write their own story.

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Header image: [Photograph: Jose Breton/NurPhoto/Shutterstock]