FIRST, Spain’s players had to perform the rituals of celebration. They communed with their fans. They draped themselves with a selection of flags, national and regional.
They commiserated with their bereft English opponents. Once those were completed, they gathered by the podium hastily constructed on the field at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.
Most of the players took that moment to compose themselves, to share an embrace, to try to absorb the scale of their achievement over the past month: At the start of Euro 2024, Spain stood in the second rank of continental powers.
Now, after a flawless tournament and a 2-1 triumph over England in the final on Sunday, the country sits at the pinnacle once more.
Lamine Yamal could not contain himself, however. He danced and bounced, unable to stop moving.
He knew, though not from firsthand experience, that each and every player would get chance to lift the trophy, so he made sure to practice his technique, heaving an imaginary cup three times.
When Spain’s players were eventually summoned to receive their prize, Yamal went a little too early. The assembled dignitaries were not yet in place when he scampered onstage. He had to be called back by his teammates – greeted not with censure but an affectionate, somewhat paternal ruffle of the hair.
Spain captain Alvaro Morata, with the microphone, introduces teammate Lamine Yamal to the fans during celebrations of their Euro title on a stage at Cibeles square in Madrid on July 15. — AP
It has been easy over the past few weeks to forget quite how young Yamal is.
Only 16 years old for most of the tournament, he is so young that German law requires that he have special dispensation to work late in the evening.
He is so young that he has had a designated guardian with him at all times. He is so young that, standing by the podium, he could probably taste the cake he was given to celebrate his 17th birthday on Saturday.
And yet, despite his youth, Yamal can claim a large portion of the credit for taking a relatively unheralded Spanish side to a largely unanticipated glory.
It was his goal that turned the semi-final with France. It was his pass that created Spain’s opening strike in Sunday’s final, turned home by Nico Williams.
Mikel Oyarzabal might have scored the goal that sealed Spain’s victory, and the imperious Rodri might have been selected as the tournament’s outstanding player, but it was Yamal – his youth, his verve, that thrilling unpredictability that is the exclusive preserve of the prodigy – who provided the energy that has come to define this side.
That energy has proved infectious. A survey, conducted by 40bD and published on Sunday in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, found that as many as 87% of Spaniards planned to watch the final.
The national airline, Iberia, had promised anxious customers that planes flying at high altitude during the match would broadcast the game.
That can be attributed, in part, to the fact that this team are more representative of Spain than has sometimes been the case.
Yamal is of Moroccan descent; he grew up in a neighbourhood in the Catalan town of Mataro that has been demonised by Vox, the country’s surging far-right populist party.
Williams’ parents, meanwhile, immigrated from Ghana.
Oyarzabal, like a substantial portion of the rest of the squad, is proudly Basque, something that was no doubt a factor in helping the patriotic fervour engendered by the team’s success spread to those parts of Spain where separatist sentiment remains high.
Big screens had been erected in both the Basque Country and Catalunya, hardly the Spanish national team’s heartlands, allowing fans to watch the final.
But perhaps more immediately, Yamal has served to reinvigorate how Spanish football see themselves. It is more than a decade now since the country’s greatest side – possibly the finest international team the sport have ever known – lifted the last of their major trophies, a second European championship in 2012.
Since then, Spain has known little but disappointment. Its men’s team have not won a knockout game at the World Cup since their victory in the final in 2010.
They had won only two at the European Championship in that period. Their football authorities have been embroiled in a scandal that threatened to overshadow the sole glory in that period, Spain’s lifting of the Women’s World Cup last year.
Now, though, their men’s team have an honour to add to the country’s women’s triumph. “Today is a great day for Spanish sport,” said Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who was in Berlin, watching beside Spanish King Felipe VI and his youngest daughter, Princess Sofia.
A few hours earlier, Carlos Alcaraz had claimed his second Wimbledon trophy.
Spanish influence, meanwhile, is visible almost everywhere. Real Madrid have essentially made the Champions League their private property.
The best manager in the Premier League is Spanish. So is the second best. Spanish managers won league titles in France and Germany this year, too.
Many of the ideas that fire the style of play that has become dominant across Europe’s elite teams have at least some of its roots in Spain.
More than a new dawn, then, Sunday’s title felt like a reassertion of something older, something more entrenched, something more akin to Spain’s returning to their rightful place at football’s summit.
In Yamal, they have the perfect standard-bearer for their reconquista, an avatar for a new generation, one that can expand the achievements of the old.
As Spain’s players celebrated, golden confetti littering the field at their feet, they were suddenly face to face with their monarch, immaculately dressed as ever.
They handed the king the trophy. Rather self-consciously, Felipe hoisted it into the air.
Looking faintly embarrassed, he sought out a player to take it from him. His eyes settled on Yamal. Tenderly, his hand brushed the 17-year-old’s shoulder as he handed it over.
It looked like an act of succession – an old king passing the glory to his country’s new prince. — NYT
