There is a moment of panic in which Luis de la Fuente and his work team locate the point at which they understood that what they were trying to build in the Spanish team was working. It happened on September 7 in Tbilisi. Two hours before training before Georgia-Spain, the coach’s phone rang: “They call me and say: ‘Mister, I have to tell you something. We have forgotten our boots.’ How? “He recalled a few days ago in Las Rozas surrounded by his staff. “Calm. There’s a solution?. ‘Yes, of course,’ they told me. Well, calm down. We’ll dress him in any way. We said: don’t worry, tomorrow we are going to play, and there will be boots.”
“Is this going to happen to us too?” thought Miguel Ángel España, the goalkeeping coach. “Why was the Federation news at that time?” says Juanjo González, assistant technician. “Because we came with problems. And the first thing that happens when you arrive in Georgia is another mess. It just can’t be…”. FIFA had just disqualified Luis Rubiales as president, two weeks after he kissed Jenni Hermoso during the presentation of the World Cup trophy in Australia and New Zealand to the women’s team. In Tbilisi, while waiting for a private flight to deliver the boots, the coach’s continuity was even questioned: “The day before they asked me: ‘Are you risking your job?’” De la Fuente recalls.
The match was decisive for qualification for this Euro Cup in which the team opens on Saturday against Croatia in Berlin (6:00 p.m., La1). “If you don’t beat Georgia, it could get complicated,” says Spain. “And this boots thing happens, and then you win. And how you win. “Probably the best game.” They overwhelmed with a 1-7, after a previous training session in sneakers in which the footballers played down the mistake of the boots, as Spain remembers: “They were supporting and giving love to the people who could be responsible.”
Javier López Vallejo, the psychologist, believes the moment of panic had a positive effect: “It helps to generate a feeling of belonging, having a group where beyond sporting values are personal values, like a family.”
Pablo Amo, the 46-year-old assistant coach, believes that this effect comes from the way in which De la Fuente has put together his team: “It helps that we all come from the youth teams, we have a very powerful type of message, adapted to the selection”. They have spent years crossing paths in different roles, after having met before in a locker room, as Amo says: “I played with Juanjo at Sporting and with López Vallejo at Recre and Zaragoza. They are links that help.”
These connections and the spirit of the coach contribute to the flow of information and ideas, as the analyst, Pablo Peña, explains: “We are a fairly open coaching staff. No one ever feels inhibited from giving an opinion. There is no brake, due to the professionalism we have and the confidence that Luis shows us.” Several members of the staff agree in defining De la Fuente as “a democratic leader” who listens to all opinions, even those of those who do not seem directly related to a specific issue. “With greater or lesser incidence, we all do everything,” says Peña.
But they also know that good vibes are not enough, as the coach explains: “The player wants you to help him win, and we help him win with all the information we give him to prepare for the matches. He helps what I always say about good people, it is the added value, but in the end it is about preparing the games to win and win,” he says. “And these are the best in preparing the games and in the way of explaining it.”
That’s where the specific tasks come in, beyond that kind of community of ideas. Juanjo González, 50 years old, who has been in the federation since 2014, and who is now the third coach, takes care of set pieces in the run-up to the matches. Pablo Peña, 39 years old, who arrived in 2008 to create the analysis department and has worked in four World Cups, is key to conveying the messages: “I support all colleagues at an audiovisual level,” he explains. “What I do is enhance what they are going to teach the players, explain extremely specific things and make sure the players understand it the way we want them to understand it.”
Miguel Ángel España, 51, emphasizes the importance of this process: “Luis has said it: many times our best training is the three-minute video that we show the players. We don’t have time for heavy workloads, because physiologically there is no time.”
The physical trainer, Carlos Cruz, 37 years old, knows this well, that in the short space that he has the footballers under his command he does not have much margin: “It is to give continuity to their work, to what they have been doing, and to try to change as little as possible. And even less in final phases like now,” he explains. “The important thing is that the player is recovered to compete well. You have no room for improvement, but you do have to do enough so that the player is prepared.”
Nor does he have much leeway with the Spain goalkeepers, the oldest in the federation, which he joined in 2006: “Our only obsession is to generate for the player the automatisms of our offensive and defensive game model as soon as possible: the tactical aspect. “I am not going to improve Unai Simón’s blocking in nine days.”
The work of the entire group is coordinated by Amo, who has been helping De la Fuente since the 2021 U21 European Championship: “There we connected very well, especially because of that interaction in responsibility, because of how he listened to me and the role he gave me in the talks,” he says. “I am here to try to make everything work well and coordinate the coaching staff, so that Luis receives the most filtered information and gives him more security.”
López Vallejo, 48, also contributes to this: “There is a phrase that Luis says a lot, and that is that we cannot all look in the same direction,” says the psychologist. “I am in charge of looking more from behind, from above.” More than as an individual therapist, he acts as a kind of interpreter of the emotional currents of the group, as González explains: “He helps us direct things where we want to take them, whether it is a tactical talk, a motivational talk… He tells us: today it’s time for a something or touch another.”
Furthermore, López Vallejo has a special space for the coach: “I try to help Luis by giving him emotional stability. A coach has to make many decisions in a very short time without all the information and under a lot of pressure. I try to give him emotional balance so that he makes the best decisions and has as few regrets as possible.”
As he has no regrets about the footballers he has chosen: “You want in these difficult situations, which in football are more than the good ones, that people help, that they row in the same direction. If not, they start to make bad faces, and that remains,” says the coach. Like in Tbilisi without boots. “That day was very good.”
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