Santiago de Compostela, on a grey Thursday evening in early June, smelled of wet stone and eucalyptus. The Estadio Riazor, half-empty and thrumming with the low hum of a crowd that had come to see a team rather than a result, was the last place on the Iberian Peninsula where Luis de la Fuente’s Spain would play before the long flight west. By Friday morning, at ten, the team coach would leave for Chattanooga, via Nashville. Seven of the eight men who had made their debuts on Thursday would not be on it.
The 1-1 draw against Iraq, sealed by a long-range strike from Iraq’s Abdul-Razzaq Doski that curled past Peña in the Spain goal and into the net behind a defence that looked, for long stretches, as though it had never played together, was not a good performance. The Guardian’s Sid Lowe, in his match report from A Coruña, called it “really not very good either”, a verdict that the second half, in which Spain’s back line was beaten to second balls and caught flat-footed by transitions, did nothing to contradict. A twenty-two-minute cameo from Mikel Merino, who came on in the sixty-eighth minute and immediately gave the midfield a spine it had lacked, was about the best thing about it.
But the result was never the point. De la Fuente, who has managed Spain’s senior side since 2022 and who will take them into the World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico as one of the tournament’s favourites, used the fixture as a laboratory. He fielded an experimental lineup, giving debuts to eight players who, with seven exceptions known in advance, would not be on the plane. The exercise was deliberate. It was also revealing, in ways that may unsettle those who believe Spain’s depth is as limitless as their first-choice starting eleven is formidable.
The seven players who will be cut from the World Cup squad are not names that will trouble supporters of Barcelona, Real Madrid or Manchester City. They are, overwhelmingly, players from mid-table La Liga sides and from the Segunda División, men who were called in because the first-choice squad was resting key players after a long season. Their exclusion was, in most cases, a foregone conclusion before the final whistle in A Coruña. What the Iraq fixture exposed was not the quality of the players being cut, which was always going to be insufficient for a World Cup squad, but the gap between Spain’s first team and the next seven names on the list.
That gap has been narrowing for a decade. Spain’s golden generation, the one that won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012, was built on a Barcelona core so dominant that the national team was, for a period, an extension of a single club’s philosophy. The current side is more distributed. Rodri and Dani Olmo anchor a midfield that draws from Manchester City, Barcelona and, increasingly, from the wide forward positions at clubs across the Premier League and La Liga. The squad that will fly to Chattanooga is, by any measure, one of the strongest in the tournament.
Yet the Iraq draw showed what happens when you remove that core and ask the next tier to execute the same positional play, the same pressing triggers, the same rotations that have made Spain the most technically accomplished side at the last two major tournaments. The debutants tried. Several of them, in brief passages, found the right angles and the right passes. But the collective rhythm that defines Spain’s football, the thing that makes their possession look like conversation rather than circulation, was absent. Doski’s goal, a strike from distance that exploited a moment of disorganisation in the Spanish midfield, was the kind of goal that a fully loaded Spain would not have conceded, not because the defending was poor in isolation but because the structural cover that Rodri and Olmo provide was missing.
De la Fuente, in his post-match comments, was measured. He praised the debutants for their effort and emphasised that the fixture had served its purpose. He was right to do so. The World Cup is not won in A Coruña in June. It is won in July, in stadiums in the United States, with the players who have earned their place through a season of club football and a qualifying campaign that Spain navigated with the efficiency of a side that treats group-stage fixtures as administrative tasks.
The question that lingers, after the draw with Iraq, is not whether Spain will be among the favourites in North America. They will be. The question is whether the margin between their first team and their bench is wide enough to survive the attrition of a seven-match tournament. Injuries, suspensions, the fatigue of playing at altitude in Mexico City or in the humidity of Houston, these are the things that test a squad’s depth. The seven players who will not fly to Chattanooga have, in one sense, already answered that question for themselves. The players who remain will answer it in July.
For now, the Spain team coach leaves Santiago de Compostela on Friday morning, bound for a tournament that will test not just the quality of their best eleven but the resilience of the group behind them. The Iraq draw was not a warning. It was a reminder, delivered in a half-empty stadium on a wet evening, that even the most elegant footballing cultures have a floor beneath which the game becomes something less than what they intend. Spain’s floor, on Thursday, was visible. Whether it matters in July is a different question entirely.
