As England again wonder how Keira Walsh can evade Spain’s intense press to decide a major trophy, some in the Football Association are still marvelling at the shift. This is as high a level as you can get, and is now a frequent challenge. They grew up hoping just to qualify for tournaments.
“I have trouble explaining to my kids sometimes that this isn’t normal,” FA chief executive Mark Bullingham laughs. “When you look at 1967 and through 50 years to 2020, we made one final.”
The Euro 2025 final will mark the third consecutive major final for Sarina Wiegman’s team, and also the fifth in five years across England’s women’s and men’s squads. But there is one country that matches that, and that is Sunday’s opposition, who they of course know well. Spain have reached the final of the last three major tournaments, across women’s and men’s, to go with three consecutive Nations League finals, and all of that on the back of the original 2008 revolution in their men’s game.
Those in Spanish football who care about the women’s game now feel the same as Bullingham. It’s still amazing that the world champions hadn’t won a knockout match until 2023, just as the men’s team couldn’t get beyond quarter-finals for decades.
The game’s two historic underachievers have become the modern powers. That is also down to something much better than old-fashioned football cycles. It’s about resources, and culture.
To spin Bullingham’s own words around, this actually is a “new normal”, because it is entirely logical cause and effect. England and Spain are two of the wealthiest football economies in the world, and have finally developed infrastructures to match them. The fact they are doing it across the women’s and men’s games is all the more relevant ahead of this final because it speaks to the breadth of the approaches. They’ve got to the point where everyone else – including at this tournament – asks them how they did it.
And while there are shared ideas on coaching principles and structural concepts, the two countries have really come from different angles. Or, really, different ends.
While England’s progress has been top-down, Spain’s has been bottom-up. That contrast might yet decide Sunday’s final in Basel, as well as what comes next.
England’s progress has been from a decision that was as rudimentary as you can get. They threw money at it.
In 2016, as a next step in the “England DNA” philosophy that was founded with St George’s Park, the budget for women’s football was increased by 16 per cent. This went up repeatedly over the next three years, a period that overlapped with the formative seasons of more than half of Wiegman’s Euro 2025 squad.
In short, they were exposed to drastically improved coaching, facilities and structure. It was why there was a deeper truth in Wiegman’s simple, if self-effacing recent explanation for success, that she has “very good players”.
She does, and better than most of those at Euro 2025, but not by accident or just one good generation. England are benefiting from investment, in money and energy.
Given that the Spanish federation has been greatly criticised for attitudes to the women’s game, it would be wrong to say their players benefited from similar. But there was something even deeper in the football culture.
You can go anywhere in Spain and you will see countless small-sided outdoor pitches. They’re always full of kids playing and they’re all established by local authorities. Boys and girls have somewhere to go, which complements the other vital elements that came together at once.
Such pitch coverage is linked to national strategy shifts from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which also happened to be the year that Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona won the Champions League. An entire ideology was imprinted in the Spanish football psyche, and at the same time kids could freely express it.
The very spatial dimensions have conditioned a climate in which six-year-olds immediately start learning two-footed technique in enclosed spaces, with this base ability then honed by some of the best club academies in the world.
Uefa figures who work in the grassroots liken it to speaking a language: if you learn all of this as your brain develops, from six to nine, it is all internalised to a much deeper level. So, in an almost organic way, Spanish football culture nurtures this groundswell of talent, readily integrated in a distinctive ideology.
That exposure to two-footed football from such a young age is something that is still “hit and miss” in the UK and Ireland, as well as even Germany. It’s why many see Portugal as the coming force, too. There, you can’t even coach six-year-olds without a Uefa A licence, a decree that has resulted in a recent explosion of men’s talent. The same is expected in the women’s game if recent investment continues.
More concerningly for everyone else, the Spanish federation is finally forging stronger links with their local setups.
Hence, Bullingham talking on Thursday about how Spain’s “grassroots coaching level is phenomenal”, as well as the need to “build an equivalent” of the English men’s Elite Player Performance Plan for women.
That’s also why Spain’s 2023 World Cup win was all the more influential, despite the Luis Rubiales controversy. More girls were inspired to play by female role models, at the same time those same players forced the football authorities into changes.
England’s own players are fully appreciative of that, as are the FA. “We have said before that, until we have the same number of girls and boys playing football, we still have a job to do,” Bullingham explained.
This top-down/bottom-up contrast may well condition Sunday in another way. It certainly conditioned the 2023 final, as well as performances in this tournament so far.
On one side, the Spain players have internalised an ideology, that they then naturally express. It’s all so fluidly integrated, so the women play in the exact same way as the men, and every coach appointed fits into this approach. The tactics come from within.
Against that, England have appointed an elite coach from outside, who has also imposed tactics on the players.
While it has worked for individual tournaments, it does pose longer-term questions for the FA. Some who work in the grassroots feel this contrast has potentially influenced England’s lack of elite coaches, because the coaching pathway isn’t as defined. The flip side is also that you don’t necessarily need star managers if the coach understands the ideology. Many stakeholders feel England’s successive men’s under-21 Euros victories under an English coach in Lee Carsley are actually the most significant recent development, and should be given due credit.
“We need to keep improving our level, coaching at every stage of the pathway,” Bullingham says. He insists that doesn’t necessarily mean exactly replicating Sunday’s opposition.
“Whether we go quite as far as the Spanish in knowing the exact style of play, you obviously want players that are technically strong, comfortable on the ball, to play out and so on, I think we probably then still want a bit of flexibility on how we play.”
We will witness the difference on Sunday. The term of the campaign, “proper England”, is really “tournament ball”: tie-specific responses to get through individual knockout games. On the other side, Spain have gone for an integrated ideology.
They’re two competing approaches for the teams, but all from complementary rises for the federations. The very fact it’s the third consecutive final between the two showcases the shift.
