25/04 - 20:00
When Cesc Fabregas sent Gianluigi Buffon the wrong way minutes before midnight on the eve on the 22nd of June 2008, it felt huge, but no one could’ve predicted just how momentous a goal it was.
Spain had just beaten World Champions Italy on penalties, for the first time in a competitive match, finally advancing past the quarter-finals of an international tournament for the first time since 1984.
Perennial underachievers on the international stage, with just a single 1964 European Championship to their name, a golden generation went on to achieve gold, three times to be exact, becoming the first and only ever national team to win a consecutive trio of tournaments.
They had conquered the world once, and Europe twice. Andreas Iniesta made them World Champions in 2010 after a tight series of 1-0 knockout wins, before a 4-0 destruction of Italy in the Euro 2012 final confirmed them the most dominant international team to ever play the game.
The run came to a spectacular end in 2014, with the everlasting image of Robin van Persie’s diving header opening the scoring in a 5-1 group stage win for the Netherlands, over the team that beat them in the World Cup final two years prior.
Defeat to Chile followed, knocking the defending champions out before they’d even started. And there was another revenge mission two years later in Euro 2016, with Italy’s last 16 victory meaning Spain had to surrender a trophy they’d owned for eight years.
After the 2008 win, Vicente del Bosque retired from football and the project he’d taken over from the man who started it, Luis Aragones, having won everything in football, and Spain had a semi-rebuild. Crucially, the original spine of Iker Casillas, Carles Puyol, Xavi Hernandez, Xabi Alonso and David Villa were gone, but that wasn’t where the nightmare truly began.
New coach Julen Lopetegui had guided the team through qualification for the 2018 World Cup, and whilst sitting in a Russian hotel waiting for Spain’s opening game two days later, Lopetegui was sacked, as the news broke that he had agreed to coach Real Madrid after the tournament.
A below par Spain made it through the group, but lost in the first knockout, on penalties to Russia, as a previously great side began its demise.
Since the tournament former Barcelona treble winner Luis Enrique took the post, but left under tragic circumstances, and the majority of the greatest international team have left, with the only integral players remaining being Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba and Sergio Ramos.
The side are, for the second time in four years, under temporary management, and on Wednesday night stumbled to Euro 2020 qualification, with a team that's quickly gone from looking like the definition of Champions League, to appearing distinctly Europa.
Spain’s golden generation was regularly four from Real Madrid, six from Barcelona and Joan Capdevilla; the Barcelona side that dominated club football under Pep Guardiola, unsurprisingly dominated the national team, both teams stylistically dictated by one of football’s greatest ever, Xavi Hernandez.
Tournament football requires luck, but one very good way to mitigate bad luck is to dominate games. Having a midfield trio from arguably the best ever club and international teams goes quite a long way towards that, demonstrated by Spain winning every knockout game of the 2010 World Cup 1-0. Now, with only Busquets left, things are beginning to fall down around him.
Despite having record scorer David Villa, Spain never had consistent strikers, with midfielders David Silva and Cesc Fabregas taking turns leading the line at the tail end of their domination. Now though, with Valencia’s Rodrigo, Villarreal’s Gerard Moreno and Real Sociedad’s Mikel Oyarzabal, Spain sit a long way down the list of the world’s best forward groups.
In England we question why our golden generation never came close to fulfilling their potential, with parallels drawn between the things Spain did right, always being the things England did wrong.
Not enough investment in youth, a lack of English coaches, zero tactical identity, or even needing an XI formed of players from only a few club sides.
The fact is; there’s no right answer, It’s a multitude of things that made Spain the best. And while England were very far from the only introspective country working out how to play catch up, Spain themselves have wandered so far from what made them great, that they’ve joined the long list of nations trying to work out how to mimic their previous success.
Perhaps this is exactly why the buzzwords ‘golden generation’ are so often cited. Could coincidence have brought together some of the greatest possession based players of all time, and they just all happened to be Spanish? It’s unlikely.
But whether you look at coaching, personnel, tactics or style, Spain are now so unidentifiable from what made them football’s greatest, they look lightyears away from the side where all those factors came together for six years of winning perfection.
