Euro 2024 champion reflects on sealing Spain’s triumph and how a team without big names were stronger together
After breakfast on the morning of the Euro 2024 final, a small group of players stayed in the dining room on the first floor of Spain’s hotel on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz and talked. They had sat together most days over the five weeks spent at their Der Öschberghof HQ outside Donaueschingen and all round Germany, from Gelsenkirchen to Düsseldorf, Cologne to Stuttgart and Munich, a bunch of friends chatting about everything and nothing, but 14 July wasn’t most days. Back in Berlin where it had all begun, this was the last. It was also the best day of Mikel Oyarzabal’s life and theirs, too. And somehow they knew.
“There was some feeling inside,” Oyarzabal recalls five months on, strolling across the pitch at Zubieta, Real Sociedad’s training ground, and into the warmth of a small office. “Álvaro Morata says I’m going to score. Álex Remiro too. And that morning the five of us from la Real were sitting at the table: Remi, [Mikel] Merino, Zubi [Martín Zubimendi], Robin [Le Normand] and me. We would always hang about after eating and chat. I’d been saying it for a while and I said it then: one of us was going to be important, we would have our moment.”
By the time the bus carrying the selección arrived back at the hotel at 2.15am, they had the Henri Delaunay Cup on board. Oyarzabal had his kit in a plastic bag – this was one shirt he didn’t want to swap and besides, it wasn’t a good time to ask the broken England players for theirs – and the match ball too. Introduced with 20 minutes left, the captain who got the only goal in perhaps the biggest game Real Sociedad had ever played and scored in every final he had played, had now scored the winner that made Spain European champions.
That afternoon, Morata had said his “foot smells of goal”; at the start of the second half, Remiro told David Raya that he was going to come on and win it. The moment they foretold arrived with three minutes left. “I can see that Cucu [Marc Cucurella] is on the run and the ball’s just going to reach him. That’s when I start to move,” Oyarzabal remembers. “When the ball comes in, all I’m thinking is: ‘Get there, get a touch.’ When it goes in, I don’t know if I’m offside. I look at the linesman and he starts to run. There’s a wait. I asked the referee: ‘Is everything OK, does it count?’’ And eventually he says: ‘Yes.’”
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Under Luis de la Fuente, Spain had started with defeat in Scotland, and although they had won the Nations League and overcame initial doubts to qualify for Euro 2024, few anticipated them actually winning it. If there was an exchange that encapsulated the expectation, or lack of it, it came just before Spain flew to Germany when a reporter at Las Rozas asked Morata how they could win the competition with these players; there wasn’t a Ballon d’Or candidate among them.
Yet here they were, not just champions but perhaps the best champions the competition has ever had: seven wins from seven, victorious against Italy, Germany, France and England. Oh, and one of them did win the Ballon d’Or as well.
While Oyarzabal insists the players didn’t care what was said and denies that criticism became fuel – “What matters is when a teammate tells you you’re doing something badly; that’s when you have to change, not when someone on the outside does” – they were well aware of the pessimism among the press and public. They had talked about it too, convinced that many were wrong about the players they had and the group they were building, taking in “everything there before the Euros, the things people said, the fact that they didn’t trust in us”.
“Then as we went through, people started climbing on board. That’s normal? Maybe, but it’s not logical. And if you’re not helping, don’t think people will happily watch you trying to join in. It could be that there were teams [represented in the selección] with smaller fan bases and people support their [club] players maybe. But we did feel people’s support and when we got back the reception was spectacular. Some criticised of course and you don’t like that but it’s part of all this.
“Maybe there was no crack mundial, a world superstar, seen from the outside. But look at it. Rodri is the best in the world in his position. Lamine [Yamal], if he’s not the best is one of them, a kid who with a natural talent and a very, very high understanding of the game: he should be at school and he’s scoring in the semi-final. The form Nico [Williams] was in, there are few like him. [Dani] Carvajal was at an incredibly high level. Unai Simón, too.
“We might not have had ‘names’ but we were convinced we had players who were top three in the world. And we were clear that while there were teams with very good individuals, as a group we were stronger: being a team, knowing what to do at every moment, few sides could stand up to us. Watching other games, there were none like us.
“The three [captains, Rodri, Carvajal and Morata] were very important, each with a defined role and everyone was behind them; you can say whatever you like but if no one follows you, you have a problem. Álvaro is a different captain but I wouldn’t say he’s so unusual. When someone shares their feelings, you feel that you matter too, that they trust you. The coach stressed to the group: work for your teammate, not your own benefit; that’s the values the manager embodies.
“People were very unfair to Luis de la Fuente; they didn’t know him and were quick to criticise. Prejudices can kill you. If you don’t know, you don’t have to offer an opinion. And I think we’ve seen who Luis is: the person he is, the coach he is, how he built a group.”
‘Group’ is the word, a story told in the goalscorers. It is tempting to see the absence of a superstar, a dominant figure, as part of the secret; to find explanation in the soft, undemonstrative way Oyarzabal speaks, the way he is. In the final, he scored the winner, Williams the opener. In the semi-final it had been Lamine Yamal and Dani Olmo, the top scorer who started as a sub. In the quarters, Merino came on and scored an 118th-minute winner. In the last 16, Rodri and Fabián Ruiz got the first of four. Morata, Carvajal and Ferran Torres all scored in the group phase.
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At kick-off in the final, Spain’s 10 outfield players represented 10 different clubs; by full time, four of those sitting together that morning had played the final. Based in the capital of Gipuzkoa, the country’s smallest province, no club had more players in the squad than Real Sociedad. Which is the kind of thing you might make a noise about only that, Oyarzabal says, “wouldn’t be us”; this is a place where people “don’t like being in the spotlight, the exposure”.
There was something fitting about Oyarzabal getting the goal, a product of his province, the embodiment of a collective triumph, success shared and understated: a player who had worked with De la Fuente at youth level, by his own admission “quiet, reserved”, and still playing for the club where he began; a man who had missed the World Cup with a torn cruciate ligament, silently fighting back. No media star, no lobby behind him, Oyarzabal grew up a Real Sociedad fan who recalls going with his father to watch David Silva at Eibar, his home town 50km east of the capital.
All he wanted to do was play: “You progress, get a bit closer, and think maybe one day you’ll play for la Real, but you never imagine this. You just play and what has to happen will happen.
“Maybe not going to the World Cup made me win the Euros. Doctors said I could play within nine months but that to really be right would take two years. You have days it hurts more, days it hurts less, but that’s football. Every day something hurts, everyone has that. There are worst sufferings in life than those footballers go through. But it is true that footballers carry that bad stuff inside; outside only the good stuff is usually seen.”
It is not just physical; Morata’s honesty over his mental health revealed that, his willingness to share his vulnerabilities internally strengthening the group – a concept that goes beyond just the captain. “Among us, we bring things out. It’s in the group that we feel reflected, we know the person before us understands, can help,” Oyarzabal says. “Maybe people don’t realise a player can be affected. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if they did. We understand each other, we talk.
“My friends knew I had struggled to be at the Euros. And when it ends, it all comes to you: everything you’ve suffered, all the hard moments you’ve been through, all those times you needed people. The fact that my friends were in the stands, my whole family was watching with my son, and my Real teammates coming to me at the whistle meant a lot.
“To share an experience like this with four friends who’ve spent years together was a plus. They felt the way I did, they knew. We trusted ourselves from the start; as a group we were unmatched. There are lots of people who are good footballers but you have to be good as humans too. The goal happened to me but it belongs to everyone.”
