Little quiz for you, before the Euro 2024 final. Team A have completed the most passes of any side in the tournament, as well as the most short passes and the most touches in midfield, and can boast three of the four players with the most touches in total. Their tournament possession is 58%.
Team B, meanwhile, sit joint-top on the list for goals and shots created on the counterattack. They have won 57% of their aerial duels, completed the most crosses, and have the third-highest rate of cross completion in the tournament (a fraction below Euro 2024 cross completion rate champions Scotland, you’ll never sing that, etc). Now: which team are England and which team are Spain?
It turns out – and the provocatively clumsy formulation of the question probably gave it away – that the princes of possession are in fact England, while the counts of the counterattack are Spain. Which instinctively feels quite interesting, given the respective footballing identities of the two nations. And because the last time they faced each other the roles were almost entirely reversed.
Just under six years ago, in October 2018, England travelled to Seville in the Nations League and ransacked a spectacular 3-2 victory after going 3-0 up in the first half. Boos rang out as Spain were subjected to their first home competitive defeat in 15 years. For Gareth Southgate’s England it would be their first victory over a major footballing nation, the establishment of a blueprint, a line in the sand. “A reference point for the future,” a proud Southgate beamed afterwards. And in a way that game in Seville is the origin story of Sunday’s final, albeit in ways that would have felt highly improbable at the time.
As Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane and Marcus Rashford cut Spain to shreds in the first 38 minutes, it was tempting to see this as a kind of template for what would become the peak age of Gareth-ball. It was the youngest England starting lineup since 1959, as well as Southgate’s first experiment with 4-3-3, the system in which Kane would drop deep and seek to release the pace of the wide forwards. Jordan Pickford would try to find Kane with medium-range passes, Kane would hold it up, spin and turn, and chaos ensued. England’s win was achieved with 30% possession.
For the new Spain coach, Luis Enrique, it was the first blemish on his record, a result that confirmed his belief that his side needed to evolve away from what had become a sterile and predictable possession game. There was more immediate surgery, too: Nacho Fernández, heavily blamed for the England goals, was dropped and would not play for Enrique again.
And over the subsequent years, Spain’s identity began to develop into something more dynamic, more urgent. The team that Luis Enrique took to the semi-finals of Euro 2020 was still possession-based, but with a greater emphasis on getting the ball into dangerous areas. Even so, the old sterility would occasionally resurface. The turning point in this regard appears to be the Nations League final defeat by France in 2021, after which Luis Enrique’s team seemed to retreat into their more familiar holding patterns. It was effectively the old Spain who arrived in Qatar for the World Cup: passing and passing without ever really threatening. At Euro 2020 Spain averaged 43 passes per shot. By Qatar 2022, that had ballooned to 76 passes per shot, and their meek second-round defeat by Morocco was proof that more radical change was required.
For Southgate, meanwhile, the win in Seville briefly offered a glimpse of a new more enterprising approach. During the second half of 2019 they were arguably the most thrilling team in world football, scoring 27 goals in six autumn games. But under the bonnet a more tectonic shift had already begun, perhaps inspired by England’s shambolic collapse against the Netherlands in the 2019 Nations League final (47% possession) and further fuelled by a chaotic 5-3 win over Kosovo, in which England were consistently caught on the counter.
Over time, the naturally cautious Southgate began to crave more security in the centre. The midfield would be rebuilt around the solidity of Declan Rice and Jordan Henderson, with Kalvin Phillips later trusted to plug the gaps and snuff out transitions. Control would stem mainly from Pickford and the defence, encouraged to keep the ball rather than look for a quick escape.
By the Qatar World Cup, the evolution of Southgate’s England into a possession-dominant team – even against top opposition – was complete. They had 57% of the ball against France in the 2022 quarter-final, 53% against Brazil at Wembley and 64% against Belgium earlier this year. Perhaps it is largely an incidental fact that they won none of those matches. But the streaky, counterattacking England of Seville – and which would occasionally rear its head over the subsequent years – has been buried for good.
To a large extent this is a story borne out in personnel. Key to the Seville gameplan was pace around Kane. But since then players such as Rashford, Sterling and Jadon Sancho have been eased out, replaced by slower and more patient ball-players such as Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden and Cole Palmer. Most of the team from that night – Harry Winks, Ross Barkley, Nathaniel Chalobah – has long receded into dust, along with the gameplan they sought to execute.
For Spain, only Nacho and Álvaro Morata have survived from that game. Staples of the Luis Enrique era such as Koke, Pau Torres and Eric García have been jettisoned. The latest coach, Luis de la Fuente, talks less about possession than “verticality”, a new approach built around the lightning pace of Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams on the wings.
In their opening group game, Croatia had 54% possession, ending a run of 136 competitive games in which Spain had seen more of the ball than their opponents. “If they give us the chance,” De la Fuente has said, “we will run very fast.”
And so six years after their last meeting, and not without a certain irony, England and Spain reconvene in largely different guises: England as the patient passers, Spain as the rapid counterattacking force.
