⚽️ Will Spain's women's footballers open their Olympic account with gold?
⚽️ Will Spain's women's footballers open their Olympic account with gold?
My Week in Sport(s): football in Paris, Caitlin Clark at midseason and Carlos Alcaraz
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
⚽️ Spain’s translation of age-group success into top-level dominance
🏀 Checking in at the halfway point of Caitlin Clark’s rookie year
🎾 Carlos Alcaraz, showing off his deft touch
⚽️ Will Spain's women's footballers open their Olympic account with gold?
This year’s Olympics in Paris will be the eighth edition of the Summer Games which has included women’s football.
Spain will be seeking to become the first nation to win Olympic gold as current holders of the World Cup — and, remarkably, it will also be the first time they’ve ever competed in the Olympic tournament.
Their rise over the last couple of years up the FIFA world rankings — an Elo-based system, as we’ve explored in a previous edition of this newsletter — has been pretty swift.
Spain only moved inside the top 10 for the first time ever in 2021. They shuffled between seventh and fifth position in the rankings throughout 2022 and the first half of 2023, then jumped into the top two after their World Cup win.
In the last three editions of the rankings — which FIFA updates every few months — they’ve been ranked first1.
They shouldn’t be falling off any time soon, either.
To go with their recent win at senior international level, Spain are the current holders of the World Cup at both the under-17 and under-20 age-groups. In continental play, their teams also won the most recently completed editions of the U17 and U19 European Championships.
But this dominance at underage level isn’t particularly new. They’ve actually been one of the most consistent nations in age-group events staged by UEFA and FIFA over the last couple of decades.
They sit in a top tier of five countries2 which have won a comfortable majority of their games in World Cups — and European Championships, where applicable — at age-group level since 1998, scoring a comfortable majority of the goals in their games in the process3.
It’s worth noting that the set of fixtures played by Spain and analysed in the chart above will more closely resemble those played by UEFA members than the standout nations from other continents. And only Germany among their European peers can better their historic win rate of 63% — and their goal share of 70% — at underage level.
While their 2022 U20 World Cup victory was their first at that age group, they did finish runners-up in 2018 — and also placed in the top three of the U17 World Cup three times between 2010 and 2016.
Their U17 side also has a long track record of success in European competition — with consecutive Championship wins in 2010 and 2011, among other top-three finishes — and at U19 level they finished first or second in Europe every year between 2014 and 2018.
Following a typical trajectory, we might have expected to see extensive underage success in the early part of the last decade followed by impressive results in the latter half.
But — despite their obvious pedigree — it took Spain considerably longer than that to ascend to the top of world football. Why?
It’s difficult to dig too deeply into their underlying performances at senior level, given the scarcity of data available on the women’s international game.
Some of the off-field context is pretty glaring, though.
The various disputes between the team’s players and the Spanish federation in the build-up to — and aftermath of — last year’s World Cup victory are pretty widely known.
But go back even further than that and it’s clear that the team have never truly been put in the best position to succeed by the RFEF.
Between 1988 and 2015, one man managed La Selección: Ignacio Quereda.
As far back as 1996, members of the Spain squad formally complained about his behaviour in the role of head coach.
But Quereda remained in post for another two decades, until a poor showing in the 2015 World Cup led the players to publicly call for his sacking.
The extent of Quereda’s alleged abuse was disclosed in a documentary called Breaking the Silence, which was released in 2021 and featured on-the-record comments from a number of Spanish internationals.
Goal described the team environment revealed by the film as “an alleged culture of rampant fear, bigotry, sexism and homophobia”; former player Mar Prieto described Quereda as “tyrannical” and demanding “absolute control” over the lives of those in his squad.
That Spain have risen to the top of the women’s game despite these poor working conditions — under both Quereda and his successor, Jorge Vilda — is a testament to the talent the country produces.
It’s also a reflection of the consistent excellence of their top club side, Barcelona, over the last half-decade4.
And their bid for gold in Paris will be boosted by the return to the fold of one of Barça’s midfield conductors: Patri Guijarro.
Patri opted not to return to the Spain squad ahead of the World Cup, as others among Las 15 — as the players who formally complained to the RFEF in 2022 are referred — did.
But she accepted a call-up from new head coach Montse Tomé for the most recent set of European Championship qualifiers.
And Tomé was able to field a midfield made up of three Barcelona stars in their 2-0 win over Belgium earlier this week — with the last two Ballon d’Or winners Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmatí flanking Patri.
This was a much better result than their previous outing. Last Friday, they suffered a surprise 1-2 loss away to Czechia, with Aitana the only Barça player named to start in midfield.
Spain will be heartened by the fact that other Olympic contenders aren’t necessarily in sparkling form, either.
of published a good summary of why he thinks this might be “the most unpredictable Olympics yet” on Wednesday.As Laverty highlighted, Spain’s squad has much more in common with their World Cup side than those of other top nations like the United States do — and this cohesion should stand them in good stead during the upcoming tournament.
Welcoming back Patri — who played lots of club football with many other key players last season — is a nice bonus too.
While her return might also be a sign that the RFEF have somewhat improved the team environment since the World Cup last year, past experience indicates that they don’t necessarily deserve the benefit of the doubt.
If the federation ever does put its full weight behind the team, though, the country’s depth of talent should make them a consistently dominant force in the women’s game.
Even if they don’t succeed in Paris, there will likely be many Olympic medals in Spain’s future.
🏀 Run the Numbers
It was right to err on the side of caution: Caitlin Clark won’t be at the Paris Olympics with Team USA.
How has she performed versus the offensive benchmarks we proposed in the newsletter before the WNBA season started, though? We’ve now got more than half a season of data to look at, thanks to Synergy Sports.
Starting in the half-court: she has clearly been able to orchestrate the Indiana Fever’s pick & roll attack effectively.
Her rate of 0.9 points per possession generated on shots and passes out of the pick & roll is higher than the 0.8 PPP threshold we set at the beginning of the year, and in line with other high-usage players in the league like the New York Liberty’s Sabrina Ionescu. She’s also hitting a very respectable 38% of her catch-and-shoot three-point shot attempts so far5.
It’s in transition — the weakest part of her offensive game in college6 — that she’s fallen down, though.
Clark has finished the most transition opportunities of any player in the league — but scored only 0.7 points per possession on them, far below the 1 PPP threshold we set for her to have a good chance of cracking Team USA.
Every other high-usage transition player in the league is far above this mark: the Fever guard ranks lowest in PPP of all players who average at least two transition opportunities per game, according to Synergy.
And the story here is her propensity to turn the ball over: she does so on a third of these transition possessions that she finishes. In contrast, Jackie Young — the best transition scorer among potential Team USA guards over the last couple of seasons — has turned the ball over only 14% of the time in transition.
🎾 Watch the Games
Last time Carlos Alcaraz was featured in this section of the newsletter, it was to highlight his rocket of a forehand.
What the four-time Major champion can do with an almost stationary racquet is just as thrilling to watch as his explosive ground game, though.
When Alcaraz approaches the net, he can expertly absorb the pace of his opponent’s stroke with his deft hands — and he was able to do this against Daniil Medvedev near the end of their men’s singles semi-final at Wimbledon last Friday.
At a score of 40-15 in the eighth game of the match’s fourth set, Alcaraz pushes Medvedev deep and wide with a serve that lands just inside the box.
Medvedev is able to scramble a flat forehand back from right corner, but has left the entirety of the court open in the process — with the Spaniard already on his way in towards the net.
Alcaraz is still on the move when he intercepts the return, but works against his forward momentum and gently deflects the ball into the open space with his backhand to claim a fifth game in the set — and take him to the cusp of victory.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday July 27th.
In rating points terms, they haven’t quite got as high as the United States at their most recent peak, though.
In descending order of goal share: Japan (75%), Germany (73%), USA (71%), Spain (70%), North Korea (66%).
The UEFA women's club coefficients ranking compares European club teams based on their performances over the last five editions of the Champions League, and Barcelona have been ranked as a top-three team since 2019-20.
In that piece from May, I highlighted a success rate of 35% on these shots as a good level for Clark to achieve.