Why Catalans and Basques will be watching the World Cup final out of the corner of their eye

On Tuesday, Spain swept past tournament favourites France in Dallas, 2-0, to reach the World Cup final against Argentina. Spain could easily have won by more. The following day, a headline in Marca, Spain’s biggest selling sports paper, put the knife in, asking: “How do you say, ‘a thrashing’ in French?”

Midway through the first half, Lamine Yamal, who was born in Catalonia 19 years ago, cleverly forced a penalty from France. His teammate, the Basque striker Mikel Oyarzabal, scored from the penalty spot, hammering the ball into the net like a man driving a nail into a plank of wood.

On the hour mark, Dani Olmo, who was also born in Catalonia, provided the deftest of assists for Spain’s second goal. Around Spain, there were delirious scenes of joy, as revellers celebrated in bars and plazas, festooned in the colours of La Roja, but not so much in the Basque Country or Catalonia.

Before the match, Barcelona’s City Council announced – perhaps with a gleeful tone – that it wouldn’t be setting up any giant screens in public squares to show the game. The same spirit prevailed in Basque cities San Sebastián and Bilbao. Nothing like the fervour generated when, say, Athletic Bilbao won the Copa del Rey, Spain’s cup competition, in 2024, when it packed out its stadium, San Mamés, for fans watching the final on a big screen.

Spain’s march through the tournament triggers mixed emotions in the two regions, which both have long separatist histories; this despite the majority of Spain’s World Cup squad hailing from either Catalonia in the country’s northeast or the Basque Country in the northwest.

Of Spain’s starting XI against France, three are Basque – goalkeeper Unai Simón, Aymeric Laporte and Oyarzabal, who captains San Sebastián’s team Real Sociedad; and four are Catalan – Yamal, Olmo, Pau Cubarsí and Marc Cucurella.

Several more squad players are Catalan – the illustrious back-up goalkeepers David Raya and Joan García, along with Eric García and Víctor Muñoz – and Basque, among them Martin Zubimendi, and Mikel Merino, a former team-mate of Zubimendi at Real Sociedad, grew up in the neighbouring province of Navarre.

Nico Williams, Spain’s star player in their Euro 2024 triumph, has struggled with fitness during the tournament. He plays with Athletic Bilbao, a club with a Basque-only policy. Team coach Luis de la Fuente was born in La Rioja, but he spent large chunks of his playing and coaching career with Athletic Bilbao.

Spain’s travelling party also includes Barcelona players Gavi, who joined the club’s youth academy aged 11, Pedri, who signed for Barça as a 16-year-old, and Ferran Torres, who’s been at the club since 2021.

When de la Fuente announced his World Cup squad, including eight Barça players, the Barcelona-based sports newspaper Mundo Deportivo ran a smug “8-0” front-page headline, signalling that, for the first time in 17 World Cup finals in which Spain have qualified, it had no Real Madrid player.

On the morning of Spain’s opening World Cup match against Cape Verde, however, Real Madrid announced that Cucurella, the team’s feisty left back, had joined from Chelsea for a reported fee of €60 million, a hefty sum for a 27-year-old defender. But Real Madrid’s president Florentino Pérez reckons it will be worth every penny, if some blushes are saved should Spain be crowned World Cup champions.

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Spain’s fortunes are important to Madridistas, but not to Basques, who are at best ambivalent. Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, Spain’s far-right political party, grew up in Bilbao in the 1980s. He has complained in interviews that, as a child, he was bullied at school for wearing the Spain national team jersey.

When football took hold in Spain at the turn of the last century, the game thrived in particular in the Basque Country. Spain, for example, played its first international match in Bilbao in 1921 at the historic San Mamés stadium. The Spain national team – unlike, say, with national teams in Ireland or Britain – rotates the venue for its home games in stadiums around the country. It hasn’t played, though, in Bilbao since 1967.

During the fever of this summer’s World Cup, and casting an eye forward to 2030 when Spain will co-host the tournament, Basque regional president Imanol Pradales was asked during a radio interview with national broadcaster RTVE if he’d like Spain to play in the Basque Country.

Pradales said Spain would be welcome to play in Bilbao’s San Mamés stadium, but only against the Basque Country. Football fans like Pradales would prefer if the Basque Football Federation could enter a team in international tournaments. Oyarzabal, Spain’s top scorer in the World Cup, has played for the Basque national team.

The Catalan Football Federation, which is 13 years older than the Royal Spanish Football Federation, also fields a national team that plays international friendlies, more than 200 over the last century or so, most recently against Palestine last November at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium. For several years, the team was managed by Barça’s spiritual leader Johan Cruyff.

Gerard Piqué, a member of Spain’s only World Cup-winning team in 2010, played 10 times for Catalonia. In 2014, he joined 1.8 million Catalans marching for independence on September 11th, “La Diada”, Catalonia’s national day.

During the peaceful march, he tweeted a photo to his 9.4 million followers on social media, cradling his two-year-old son, who, incidentally, was wearing Barça’s away strip that year, its four red bars against a yellow background a homage to the Catalan flag. Writing in Catalan, Piqué shared an exuberant message: “I’ve never experienced anything like it! Simply unforgettable! #Diada2014.”

A month later, he was in camp in Madrid with the Spain national team. A thousand fans trundled out to the team’s training session to jeer Piqué for supporting Catalan separatism. During a press conference on the eve of Spain’s forthcoming match, Piqué defended his position, explaining he supported Catalans’ right to vote on self-determination and that, yes, he was a Catalan, but also that he was proud to represent Spain over the previous 11 years at underage and senior level.

Piqué’s eloquent explanation resonated with people, capturing the duality a lot of Catalans feel – the silent majority, to borrow an expression. Although a Catalan football man like Pep Guardiola would have less nuanced feelings. He’s more hardline, which is why – although he played for Spain – he would never manage the Spain national football team.

Three years later, Catalan separatists staged an informal (or “illegal”) referendum on independence. Reserve police were bussed into Catalonia from around Spain, departing their villages like soldiers going to war, with cheers of “Go get them!” ringing in their ears. The day of the referendum, more than 800 people were injured by riot police. There were horrific scenes of female voters being dragged by the hair from polling stations.

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Rather than forfeit a league match, Barça played visiting side Las Palmas later that afternoon behind closed doors at the Camp Nou stadium. Barça, which has the Catalan flag embroidered on its crest, won 3-0, but it was significant that Las Palmas had the Spanish flag stitched into their jerseys before kick-off out of solidarity with the rest of the country.

Flags are potent symbols in Spain. It’s why a lot of Basques and Catalans will baulk at the waving of Spanish flags around their cities and villages if Spain prevail in Sunday’s World Cup final.

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