The words we use to describe youth in professional sports often have a negative connotation. Inexperienced. Unprepared. Naive. Underdeveloped. We fall in love with some athletes who shine at a young age, but many don’t quite live up to our expectations. It dulls our senses and makes us skeptical when the next young top athlete comes along and grabs our attention by immediately excelling in their sport.
John Keating had a different idea about youth in the classroom in Dead Poets SocietyHe said: “You have to work to find your own voice, and the longer you wait to start, the less likely you are to find it.”
On Sunday, the voice of Spanish sport was raised around three athletes. All three are 22 years old or younger and none of them are yet at the top of their game, but all three play at the highest level in their discipline. Together, they represent the renewal of Spanish greatness in the two most important sports on the national sporting landscape.
Spain has reached the pinnacle of international sport thanks to Carlos Alcaraz’s victory in the men’s singles at Wimbledon, crushing seven-time champion Novak Djokovic in three sets. Standing on the pitch in southwest London, Alcaraz smiled as he looked ahead to the European Football Championship final between England and Spain later in the evening.
“I’ve already done my job,” Alcaraz said. “So let’s see football.”
Alcaraz not only watched the game, he also live-tweeted the match as Spain won their seventh consecutive Euros and fourth European title with a 2-1 victory over England in Berlin. No other nation has more than three European titles. Spanish wingers Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal scored the opening goal; Yamal won the tournament’s young player award. Alcaraz is 21. Williams turned 22 on Friday. Yamal turned 17 on Saturday. Last year, Salma Paralluelo, then 19, was one of Spain’s key players as the country won its first Women’s World Cup title.
Combine the tennis and international football titles with Real Madrid’s Champions League success in the men’s game and FC Barcelona’s dominance in the women’s game, and Spain is enjoying great success in both sports. And this new era of success is being driven by young players, echoing the generation that propelled Spain to the top of both sports twenty years ago.
Before Rafael Nadal burst onto the tennis scene with his first French Open title in 2005 at the age of 19, Spanish tennis didn’t have much of a history of winning at the sport’s highest level. Only two Spanish players had ever won more than two Grand Slams (Manuel Santana and Arantxa Sánchez), and only one male player had won multiple titles during the Open era (Sergi Bruguera). Nadal ushered in an era of success for Spanish tennis and has now won 22 Grand Slam titles. Spain has also won the Davis Cup, an international team competition, four times since Nadal’s breakthrough, in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2019. It wasn’t long before Nadal defeated Federer at Wimbledon in 2008, widely considered one of the greatest tennis matches of all time. And this match came just a week after Spain made history on the pitch.
Nadal’s rise preceded that of the greatest generation of Spanish footballers by a few years, but Spain’s rapid rise to the top of the footballing world was underway before Euro 2008. Spain lost in the round of 16 of the 2006 World Cup, but that team’s style of play led commentator Andrés Montes to coin the term “tiki-taka”.
This generation of Spanish talent would dominate the sport’s international tournaments for the next five years. They defended with the ball at all times and wore down teams with their intricate one-touch passing combinations. These technically gifted midfielders, blessed with immense passing ability, became champions in 2008 by winning the Euros. They became legends by winning the World Cup in 2010, Spain’s first, and reached a new level of excellence when Spain repeated as European champions in 2012. Each team was somewhat different but shared the same underlying philosophy. While the Spanish team won trophies in 2008 and 2010, Nadal achieved the “channel double” by winning both the French Open on clay and Wimbledon on grass in those two years. Alcaraz became the sixth man in the Open era to achieve the double this year, joining Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Djokovic, Nadal and Federer.
As Nadal nears the end of his career, he has in a sense passed the torch of Spanish tennis to Alcaraz. The two will play doubles together at the Paris Olympics in a few weeks, but Alcaraz is already the youngest men’s world No. 1 of all time and a four-time Grand Slam champion, only turning 22 next May. It was immediately apparent that Alcaraz would leave his mark on the sport when he reached the quarterfinals of the 2021 US Open at the age of 18. He had every shot imaginable at his disposal, and his combination of breathless defensive speed and constant aggression from all over the court dazzled crowds and quickly fueled his rise to world No. 1, a position he achieved a year later by beating Casper Ruud in the US Open final.
There was a small asterisk attached to that title for Alcaraz: Djokovic was unable to play in the tournament due to his vaccination status. The two men had not yet met in a Grand Slam. Alcaraz may have been No. 1, but he needed a blowout win over Djokovic to truly establish himself as the best.
They met twice in 2023. Alcaraz cramped up in the semifinals of Roland Garros and lost in four sets, but he got his revenge on the most famous court in sport by winning in five sets in 2023 to claim the Wimbledon title. With the win, Alcaraz showed that he was truly on Djokovic’s level. At the time, it was Djokovic’s first Wimbledon loss since 2017.
With the two careers now on opposite trajectories (given that Djokovic, 37, has been in slow decline from the sport’s greatest heights), Sunday’s match at Wimbledon represented the new reality of men’s tennis. With Djokovic’s recent knee surgery hampering his movement, the Serbian champion couldn’t even come close to the level at which Alcaraz regularly played. In the opening game, it took Alcaraz 13 long minutes to break Djokovic’s serve, and then the first two sets were over in a flash. Djokovic hasn’t won a top-10 match this year, and Alcaraz has now beaten Jannik Sinner, Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev and Djokovic — the rest of the top five — to win his last two Grand Slams.
Alcaraz isn’t always consistent. He’s had moments of sloppy play and puzzling errors in this tournament, but that’s part of his idealistic tennis genius. Alcaraz genuinely believes he can make any shot from anywhere on the court, and his relentless aggression, smile and genuine enjoyment of hitting are what make his matches so magnetic to even the most tennis-loving fan. When his aggression pays off, as it did with his break of Djokovic’s serve in the third set en route to the title, it produces some of the highest quality tennis the sport has ever seen. Sunday’s final may have been the best match of his career, as he maintained his high level of play for nearly the entire 2 minutes and 27 seconds that it lasted.
He combines the exuberance of his youth and relentless athleticism with sometimes naive tactics. But what is equally impressive is that despite his inexperience compared to most of his peers, Alcaraz carries himself with an experienced demeanor between the points. Like his younger peers on the court, he moves with explosiveness, but also has the control of a much more experienced top athlete.
In the semi-final against France, Spain had to field 38-year-old Jesus Navas at right-back behind Yamal in Spain’s 4-3-3, due to Dani Carvajal’s red card suspension. Navas is older than Yamal’s father. Yamal scored one of the best goals of the entire tournament, a curling left-footed shot from outside the box that curled just over the outstretched arms of French goalkeeper Mike Maignan. Yamal also provided the assist for Spain’s opening goal in the quarter-final against Germany. Williams’ success in this tournament has gone unnoticed because Yamal was on the opposite flank, but the two complement each other. Williams’ performances will no longer be underestimated now that he scored in the Euro final.
After England’s defensive approach and hard work on the wings frustrated the young Spanish duo in the first 45 minutes, the combination of the two youngsters led to Spain’s decisive goal. Carvajal looked up and played a ball slightly behind Yamal, who had to stop his run but was able to turn his hips, collect the ball and start cutting towards goal. After three touches, Yamal played a soft, bouncing pass across the penalty area that went behind the onrushing Dani Olmo but fell beautifully to Williams on the third rebound, who charged into the box from the left.
A left-footed shot put Spain 1-0 up just 69 seconds into the second half. Yamal was the first player to acknowledge him after his knee slipped in the corner and jumped on Williams’ back. Seconds later, the rest of the Spaniards in red joined in the celebrations.
Spain didn’t just win this tournament by winning all seven of their matches. They beat hosts Germany. They beat the second and third places in the 2022 World Cup (France and Croatia). They beat the two teams that played in the Euro 2020 final (England and Italy). You won’t find a tougher path in a tournament.
Spain hasn’t changed much in terms of structure and identity compared to recent versions that lost on penalties to Italy and Morocco at the last Euro and World Cup respectively. What has changed is the willingness to embrace youth. The welcome given to dynamic, pacey wingers who may lose possession more often than Spanish teams of the past, but who will also create more chances through their direct play. If you watched Spain in Qatar, it would be fair to say that they were a bit boring. There was plenty of possession and passing, but not much danger to the opposition – Spain have scored just two goals in their last three games against Germany, Japan and Morocco. Spain have scored the most goals at Euro 2024, with 15 in seven games; Yamal has scored one goal and four assists, while Williams has scored two goals and one assist.
Yamal’s patience and movement with the ball are qualities often found in a much older athlete. While Alcaraz has elements of Nadal in his game, he also resembles a blend of Djokovic’s defensive abilities with Federer’s striking and aggression. Franz Kafka once wrote that young people are happy because they can see beauty, and the beauty of Spanish youth is bound to shine for years to come.