One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Is the most important Spain player a left-footed goalscorer not named Lamine Yamal?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group H preview. You can also read previews of Cape Verde, Saudi Arabia and Uruguay.
There are three levels to understanding Spain at the 2026 World Cup, and to a certain extent, they are all correct.
On the first level, obviously the most important Spanish player is also the one who has the strongest claim to be the best player in the world. Lamine Yamal broke into the Barcelona first team shortly before he turned 16 and was arguably player of the tournament for Spain’s European Championship-winning side at 17.
Despite missing chunks of the past season through injury, he still put together his best professional season yet from a pure numbers perspective: 16 goals and 11 assists in La Liga, with a further six and four in the Champions League. Yamal has great touch, remarkably wriggly dribbling skills, and a seemingly 360-degree field vision. If you know nothing about this Spain team, know that Yamal is poised to take the leap from European soccer star to global phenomenon that is only possible via a great World Cup performance.
The second level, however, argues that one of the things that has made Yamal so great is that he gets to play nearly every minute of his career with Pedri. Lamine’s Barcelona teammate was the last great teenage sensation in Spain, and became so instantly and obviously important to the national team at 18 that he was also overworked by the time he turned 20. Pedri played nearly every minute of the Euros and the Olympics in 2021, infamously looking like he had emerged from a Safdie brothers movies by the time pre-match anthems before the gold medal match in Tokyo.
Unsurprisingly, Pedri struggled with injuries in the years immediately following his injury: Managing just 885 minutes in the season just after his marathon of international football, and not putting together a 2,000 minute season until 2024-2025.
Now seemingly healthy, Pedri is perhaps the premier ball mover and chance creator on the planet right now. For midfielders in the top five European leagues, ScoutLab ranks him in the 99th percentile in almost every metric they have that measures creating chances or progressing the ball. Expected assists, passes to enter the final third, dribbling the ball into the final third, progressive passes — in every single measure that people have figured out to quantify getting the ball closer to the goal and setting up teammates, Pedri is pretty much unparalleled.
But the third level is that Spain’s real key player is actually another diminutive left-footer. Mikel Oyarzabal has not had the kind of club season that Lamine Yamal or Pedri have had, but he has become an increasing focal point for the national team over the past two years.
Oyarzarzabal is no one’s idea of a traditional number nine: At just under six feet tall, he is somewhere between a winger, an attacking midfielder, and a striker, he provides a lot of the benefits of a “false” nine. He can drop deep to receive the ball and help with the build up, pick out passes, and create space for others.
But the thing that Oyarzarzabal has increasingly done for Spain over the past half decade is all those things and also appear in the box at the right moment. He is a great identifier of space and an intelligent runner, meaning in addition to helping create lanes for his teammates, he frequently ends up in the right place to score a big goal. It’s how he scored Spain’s Euros-winning goal two summers ago:
It is certainly possible to over-index on these sorts of things, but he also has a history of big-game goal scoring. Of his 24 international goals to date, just four have come in friendlies, and three have come in competitive finals.
This is mostly overthinking. Yamal and Pedri are the obvious keys for Spain. Two of the best players in the world, who also play together for their club team and will likely combine to absolutely run over teams until the latter stages of the World Cup.
But if there’s one thing that Pedri and Yamal’s reputation and skills create, it’s gravity. They draw the opposition to them with both their dribbling skills and the weight of what defenders know they can do. For Spain to win this tournament, they will likely need someone who is not Pedri or Yamal to take advantage of the space created by that gravity.
Mikel Oyarzarzabal has proven over the past year to be exactly the player who does that. So don’t be surprised if Spain’s biggest goals in the biggest games this tournament are scored by their other short left-footed attacker.
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