MADRID — The last time Spain reached the final of the World Cup it had a team heavy with players from the region of Catalonia, where the all-conquering FC Barcelona had refined a possession-based attacking style that laid the template for the entire country’s soccer identity.

Barcelona stars Xavi Hernández, Carles Puyol, Gerard Piqué and Sergio Busquets — Catalans, all — were key players in the side that defeated the Netherlands in the 2010 final in Johannesburg.

That historic summer for Spanish soccer was also a seismic moment for the country’s relationship with Catalonia. The day before the final, hundreds of thousands of Catalans took to the streets of Barcelona to voice their anger at a judicial decision which reversed some of the powers devolved to their northeastern region. It was the beginning of several years of territorial tensions which would culminate in a full-blown constitutional crisis, after Catalan political leaders staged a disputed independence referendum.

Sixteen years later, the challenge to Spain’s territorial unity from Catalonia and its other restive region, the Basque Country, has faded — now no more than a subplot to more urgent political battles over corruption and immigration.

Yet the Catalan and Basque presence in the World Cup squad is stronger than ever, with players from those two regions outnumbering representation from Spain’s other 15 in the squad that will face Argentina in today’s final. With no players from Real Madrid, the historic club from Spain’s capital, in the squad — although one did sign for the team in the off-season — this Spanish side relies particularly heavily on the country’s so-called periphery, those regions far from the capital’s power base.

Soccer has eclipsed politics as the vehicle for Spain’s most prominent separatist strongholds to project their identities.

“It’s not that pro-independence feeling has disappeared, but nobody sees it as a priority right now,” Lola García, a columnist at Catalonia’s centrist La Vanguardia newspaper, told POLITICO. “This government inherited one of the worst crises Spanish democracy has seen,” added Justice Minister Félix Bolaños, saying that “normalcy and co-existence have returned.”

‘The Premier League speaks Basque’

The Catalan influence on Spain’s soccer psyche began in earnest with the tenure of Dutch coach Johan Cruyff at Barcelona, between the late 80s and the mid-90s. He introduced a model of play that emphasized cool, triangular passing rather than the more physical, passionate style previously been in vogue.

A decade later, Pep Guardiola would use Cruyff’s blueprint for his own revolution, which prioritized passing and pressing — and saw his Barcelona side of 2008 between 2012 dominate all it faced. Guardiola went on to win further honors and spread his philosophy during coaching stints in Germany and England. Catalan soccer’s stock has remained high since and his former club, Barcelona, has continued to produce world-class players, many graduating from its La Masia academy, with a style that ESPN describes as “the most pressing- and possession-intensive […] on the continent.” The style is now emulated around the world.

While Catalan soccer prowess has become something of a given, expanded Basque influence in the game has been more striking in recent years. Two Basque players — Mikel Oyarzabal and Nico Williams — scored the Spanish goals that defeated England in the 2024 European Championship final.

A generation of coaches from the region have made their name both domestically and abroad. Four Basques will lead English teams at the start of this coming season, including Mikel Arteta at reigning champions Arsenal and Andoni Iraola at Liverpool.

“The Premier League speaks Basque,” the Crónica Vasca news site wrote of the richest and most powerful soccer league in the world.

Catalan separatists split

The last two decades may have witnessed the Spanish soccer team’s greatest achievements — four men’s European and world titles and a women’s world title since 2008 — but they have also seen Spain’s national unity pushed to the brink.

The brewing Catalan unrest of 2010 eventually exploded in 2017, with the separatist regional government staging a referendum on independence deemed unlawful by the conservative central administration in Madrid. The ballot went ahead amid chaotic scenes, as police baton-charged voters and the country plunged into its deepest constitutional crisis since the post-fascist return to democracy in the late 1970s.

Pro-independence politicians were jailed, direct rule was temporarily introduced from Madrid and the president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, fled to Belgium.

Nine years on, Catalonia is a different place. Those jailed are now free, while other legal action taken against Catalan nationalists has been lifted thanks to an amnesty introduced by the Socialist-led central government of Pedro Sánchez, who has been in power since 2018. On Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in favor of Puigdemont after a Spanish court had sought to prevent him from benefiting from the amnesty. The decision could, finally, pave the way for him to return to Spain without facing jail time.

“The previous independence attempt failed and so there’s not going to be another one in the short or medium term,” said García, author of two books about the Catalan crisis. “Insisting on it doesn’t make political sense” for nationalist politicians, she added.

She said Catalans are more concerned about housing, where a rental crisis is pricing out many in the region — and more widely across Spain — from the market. Immigration is also a growing worry, providing fertile ground for a relatively new far-right party, Aliança Catalana. It preaches a unique blend of anti-immigration policies and Catalan nationalism. But while advocating independence for the region, it is not promising to lead another secessionist bid.

Meanwhile, the disparate pro-independence parties that buried their economic and social differences in order to defy the government in Madrid a decade ago are once again divided.

“Since the independence drive what we have seen is a deepening of the left-right ideological differences” between separatist forces, Francesc-Marc Álvaro, a member of the Spanish Congress for the separatist Catalan Republican Left, told POLITICO.

That party now takes a more moderate approach to the independence issue than Puigdemont’s conservative Together for Catalonia and the far-left Popular Unity Candidacy.

“Not enough time has passed to embark on another [independence bid],” Álvaro said. “We’re in a phase of what you might call reconstruction and building up of strength.”

Terror and violence

Basques have their own long-standing independence movement, with some mainstream parties supporting that aim. But, as in Catalonia, the issue has been pushed into the background.

In 2011, the armed Basque separatist group ETA announced a permanent ceasefire. In 2018, it disbanded. Compared to Catalonia, the sovereignty issue in the Basque Country had literally been a matter of life and death: ETA killed 853 people over a four-decade campaign of violence, during which government-sponsored death squads also operated.

“Basque society is still in a phase of wanting to move on from what happened,” said García. “It was a lot of years of terrorism and people prefer to forget about it altogether.”

The moderate Basque Nationalist Party leads a coalition government in the region, while the more stridently separatist EH Bildu is the main opposition. With polls showing support for Basque independence at just 23 percent, and memories of the failure of the Catalan secession bid still fresh, neither party is focusing on the territorial issue.

However, nationalists in both the Basque and Catalan regions continue to demand their own national soccer teams. In the former case, they want to see players from the French-Basque region eligible.

“I’m not supporting either side,” nationalist party leader Aitor Esteban said when asked in a radio interview ahead of the Spain vs. France semifinal earlier this week. “My team is the Basque national team, and neither of these sides [France or Spain] has my support because the governments of both countries knowingly prevent us from having an official national team.”

Santiago Segurola, a sports journalist and editor of a book of essays exploring soccer’s relationship to politics, describes an “Asterix village” mentality in Spain’s Basque Country, which has a population of just over two million and a passion for soccer that verges on the religious.

“The Basque Country is small, so they look for space for pitches wherever they can find it because soccer’s so important there,” he told POLITICO.

Second-division club SD Eibar’s Ipurua stadium, for example, is on the side of a mountain, built on top of the rubble left by the bombing of the city by German and Italian aircraft during the Spanish civil war.

The region’s most successful club, Athletic Bilbao, has arguably been a proxy for nationalist dreams of a Basque national team. It only signs players who have either come through its junior ranks or represented other teams in the Spanish and French Basque Country, or Navarre. (The French-born Aymeric Laporte, who plays in defense for Spain, qualified to play for the club through Basque family links.)

Despite its strict signings policy, Athletic is one of only three clubs — along with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — never to be been relegated from the top division.

“In a globalized world where borders don’t exist, Athletic has maintained its borders,” said Segurola. “Athletic has made a virtue of this policy. This shows that soccer is more than a business.”

‘A propaganda strategy’

With its heavy reliance on Catalan and Basque players, the Spanish team poses a conundrum for nationalists from those regions: Should they support it in the World Cup?

Those who remember the febrile atmosphere in Catalonia during the height of the independence drive say support for Spain was muted. That has changed.

“Now there’s more willingness to celebrate the success of the national team and do so more freely,” said García, the columnist from La Vanguardia. “It’s not that you weren’t allowed to before, but it was frowned upon.”

Álvaro, the lawmaker from the pro-separatist Catalan party, says he has pro-independence friends who support the Spanish team despite their political opinions, because they enjoy watching Dani Olmo, Marc Cucurella, Pau Cubarsí and Lamine Yamal and other Catalan players on the biggest stage. However, he takes a different view.

“The Spanish team wants to convey a positive idea of Spain — it’s saying to Catalan and Basque nationalists: ‘This team can be your team too,’” Álvaro says. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a propaganda strategy. And there’s a problem with that, because those who are telling you that won’t let you have a Catalan team that competes on an international level, like Scotland does.”

Sixteen years ago, as the Spanish team disembarked in Madrid from the aircraft that had brought it home from its World Cup victory in South Africa, the bags of Xavi Hernández and Carles Puyol were each wrapped in the Catalan Senyera flag, in a subtle assertion of regional pride that stirred debate. Three years earlier, many claimed the duo had made a more provocative gesture by wearing their socks in such a way that the red-and-gold Spanish colors were hidden throughout an international game against Latvia.

But, with Catalan and Basque influence on the national team greater than ever and separatist tensions slackening off, such controversies are much less frequent.

Soccer, rather than independence, is now the talking point in Spain.

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