SPANISH football has, for once, been left envious of its English counterpart – marvelling at the country’s rich musical history and the connection it engenders between player and fan.
It was the emotional scenes after England’s frantic 4-2 win over Croatia on June 17 – widely regarded as the game of the tournament so far – that sent Spanish football fans to soul searching.
A Harry Kane first-half double in Dallas was twice pegged back by Croatia, before Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford finished the job in the second half.
But the result was almost secondary, as instead it was the events after the full-time whistle that have been tipped to be one of the defining moments of this World Cup.
As the England players turned to applaud their end of the stadium, the sound system struck up the 1990s classic Wonderwall, and the thousands of fans in the Dallas Stadium in Arlington, Texas, serenaded their victorious players with a uniquely English song recognised all over the world.
Kane stood and watched. A visibly emotional Bellingham mouthed along, one hand raised in the air. Liverpudlian Anthony Gordon looked close to tears.
As well as being impressed by England’s high-octane performance – and Harry Kane especially – the dominant emotion among football fans in Spain has not been mockery but something closer to longing.
One Spanish fan admitted that every time you try to write the English off, they reach for one of their iconic bands and you fall for the whole country again.
Another said they got goosebumps just watching Bellingham’s hand drift up out of pure muscle memory.
A third put it more bluntly: there is simply nothing in Spanish football to put next to winning a match and breaking into Oasis – and that an equivalent Spanish song would naturally end up being a reggaeton chorus.
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The more serious suggestions spanned songs from five decades, which mostly split into two camps: lush, old-school romantic ballads in the Julio Iglesias and Nino Bravo mould, and louder, guitar-driven picks for a younger crowd, running from Heroes del Silencio‘s brooding rock anthem Entre dos tierras to Hombres G‘s jangly 1980s favourite Devuelveme a mi chica and Miguel Bose’s theatrical Amante bandido.
A couple of outliers went for pure triumph instead: Raphael’s over-the-top Mi gran noche, or, at the cheesier end, the beach-bar singalong El chiringuito.
But the paucity of credible options taps into something Spanish football has long known about itself – clubs come first, and always have.
La Liga sells out; la Seleccion does not generate anything like the same pull, and has never had a fixed home of its own the way England has Wembley.
The current Spanish squad happen to be reigning European champions and World Cup favourites, which made it sting more that their own tournament opener, a goalless draw against Cape Verde in Atlanta, produced nothing louder than polite frustration.
The obvious question being asked back home is whether Spain could ever produce a moment like England’s.
And the honest answer, based on the past week’s evidence, is that nobody is sure what the song would even be.
A few old ballads were floated and quietly dropped; La Liga loyalty doesn’t translate into a shared back catalogue the way decades of England-at-the-pub culture does.
The above reaction was gathered from posts on X over the past few days, where the debate has run hotter than anything happening on the pitch for Spain so far.
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