⚽ Spain are the most distinctive country in international football — for better or for worse
Ground control
Welcome to the 18th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
Tomorrow will see one of the most interesting games to date of this year’s FIFA World Cup take place, as Spain play Japan in Wellington. Each team has recorded a pair of convincing group-stage wins already — and Spain have done so with their characteristic brand of passing football.
Spain are the most distinctive country in international football — for better or for worse
There are a number of statistics in the world of sport which can be a bit unfairly maligned.
Possession percentage in football is certainly among the most notorious.
It’s true that having more of the ball isn’t necessarily a guarantee that a team will have dominated the balance of scoring chances in a given game.
But looking at any sport through only this narrow analytical lens — caring simply about whether a metric is predictive of positive results — can mean that you miss out on a lot.
Used well, statistics like possession can help us describe and contrast teams’ styles of play in a rigorous fashion — and that’s helpful and interesting too.
Possession football in the 21st century has typically been associated with Spain — specifically, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona team in men’s club football, and the men’s national team of Luis Aragonés and Vicente del Bosque.
And a look at the styles of play favoured by teams in recent major international tournaments indicates that the country’s national teams continue to carry the torch.
So far in the ongoing Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, Spain — managed by Jorge Vilda — have emphasised building up from the back in a structured manner to smother their opponents1.
It’s hard to argue that they aren’t the most possession-focused team currently competing in international women’s football. Across the World Cup so far and last summer’s Euros, they have recorded three of the four highest single-game possession percentages by any side — topping out at 80% against Costa Rica last week, per FBref.
The men’s team under former coach Luis Enrique displayed similar characteristics. In games at the 2021 Men’s Euros and 2022 Men’s World Cup, his side recorded five of the six highest single-game shares of possession.
But their performances in those major tournaments serve as a cautionary tale that keeping the ball is not an end in itself.
While the men’s team were unfortunate not to progress to the final of the 2021 Euros, their dominance of possession in last December’s World Cup round-of-16 game against Morocco did not translate into a comprehensive advantage in quality of chances created — and they exited the tournament on penalties, with the head coach subsequently replaced by Luis de la Fuente.
If they are to go further at the World Cup than they did in the Euros, Spain’s women will need to combine structure and retention with incisive ball progression — much in the way that the current Barcelona Femení team has repeatedly done against elite competition in the Champions League.
But a side effect of the ongoing working conditions dispute between some of the Spanish players and their national governing body2 is that a number of those top Barça players are not in Vilda’s squad for this tournament — and the slickness of their combination play will have suffered considerably as a consequence.
This is most evident at the heart of the team’s possession structure. In the quarter-final of the Euros against England, five of the six players who started in goal, at centre back or in the centre of midfield were current Barcelona players3; in their second World Cup group game against Zambia, it was only three of six4.
There is no guarantee, then, that Spain’s dominance of the ball in international competition will continue to be accompanied by similarly emphatic results — or even underlying performances.
But there’s no doubt that these descriptive statistics still help add colour to our mental picture of international football.
Elite teams and athletes inevitably view competition through a narrow prism focused on the optimisation of performance. But we don’t have any such obligation as casual observers — and it can pay to remember that.
For them, winning is everything — but, for us, styles make fights.
Substack has recently launched a subscriber referral scheme, which enables writers to offer additional benefits to readers who spread the word about their favourite publications.
If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider inviting a friend to read it too. By following these instructions, you will start to earn a number of additional rewards whenever they subscribe!
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
Although, as Yash Thakur of noted in their daily tournament round-up after their opening win over Costa Rica, players like Salma Paralluelo have aided them in evolving their style further up the pitch: “The addition of direct and vertical wingers rather than a ball loving control oriented ones seems to have added a cutting edge about Spain’s attack, giving them penetration and the necessary verticality.”
Which the RFEF is yet to take sufficient steps to fully resolve. Sam Marsden’s coverage of this dispute for ESPN has been good: “While Vilda says the situation is now "practically resolved save a few details" following a series of meetings in the past nine months, the fact that seven players still don't feel they can return paints a different picture.” Lindsay Gibbs at also covered this briefly in their catalogue of the important off-the-field contextual issues at this World Cup.
It could have been six of six against England if Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas was fit.
Alexia has returned for the World Cup in central midfield, with club teammates Sandra Paños, Mapi Leon and Patri Guijarro no longer in the squad and dropping out.