Spain national football team players: the World Cup-winning 26, and the five who moved after it

Spain have not named a squad since they won the World Cup. The 26 players below are the group Luis de la Fuente picked on 25 May 2026, and they remain the most recent full Spain squad on record; the first list of the new cycle is due in the week before the Nations League opener against England on 26 September. So if the question is who plays for Spain right now, this is the answer, with one large caveat that runs through the whole page: five of the 26 changed clubs over the summer, and one of those moves undoes the fact this squad was best known for.

The full Spain national football team squad

Caps and goals are correct to 19 July 2026, the night of the final. Clubs are current after the summer window, which closed on 1 September. Ages are given as they will be on 24 September 2026, the day the Nations League begins.

No	Pos	Player	Age	Caps	Goals	Club
1	GK	David Raya	31	14	0	Arsenal
13	GK	Joan Garcia	25	2	0	Barcelona
23	GK	Unai Simon	29	66	0	Athletic Bilbao
2	DF	Marc Pubill	23	3	0	Atletico Madrid
3	DF	Alex Grimaldo	31	14	0	Atletico Madrid
4	DF	Eric Garcia	25	22	0	Barcelona
5	DF	Marcos Llorente	31	27	0	Atletico Madrid
12	DF	Pedro Porro	27	24	2	Tottenham Hotspur
14	DF	Aymeric Laporte	32	54	2	Athletic Bilbao
22	DF	Pau Cubarsi	19	20	0	Barcelona
24	DF	Marc Cucurella	28	32	1	Real Madrid
6	MF	Mikel Merino	30	51	12	Arsenal
8	MF	Fabian Ruiz	30	50	7	Paris Saint-Germain
9	MF	Gavi	22	32	5	Barcelona
10	MF	Dani Olmo	28	58	12	Barcelona
11	MF	Yeremy Pino	23	25	4	Crystal Palace
15	MF	Alex Baena	25	24	3	Atletico Madrid
16	MF	Rodri (c)	30	70	4	Barcelona
18	MF	Martin Zubimendi	27	27	3	Arsenal
20	MF	Pedri	23	49	6	Barcelona
7	FW	Ferran Torres	26	65	25	Paris Saint-Germain
17	FW	Nico Williams	24	36	6	Athletic Bilbao
19	FW	Lamine Yamal	19	33	7	Barcelona
21	FW	Mikel Oyarzabal	29	61	30	Real Sociedad
25	FW	Victor Munoz	23	2	1	Liverpool
26	FW	Borja Iglesias	33	9	0	Celta Vigo

There is a check in that table a reader can run in ten seconds, and it recovers the length of Spain’s tournament without being told it. Six of the 26 gained exactly eight caps between the squad announcement and the final: Merino, Ferran Torres, Fabian Ruiz, Olmo, Laporte and Rodri. Eight is how many matches Spain played to win a 48-team World Cup, so those six appeared in every one of them.

The five who changed clubs after the final

Every squad page goes stale in a transfer window. This one went stale in a specific way, because the single line most often written about these 26 no longer holds.

Player	From	To
Rodri	Manchester City	Barcelona
Marc Cucurella	Chelsea	Real Madrid
Ferran Torres	Barcelona	Paris Saint-Germain
Alex Grimaldo	Bayer Leverkusen	Atletico Madrid
Victor Munoz	Osasuna	Liverpool

When de la Fuente named this squad, the headline was that it contained no Real Madrid players, for the first time at a World Cup and only the second time at any major tournament, after Dean Huijsen and Dani Carvajal were left out. Cucurella’s move from Chelsea ends that. The champions of the world now have a Real Madrid defender in them without a single cap having been played.

The captain moved too, and in the other direction. Rodri left Manchester City for Barcelona after seven years and 196 league appearances, on a deal reported at around 76.5 million euros. He had just been given the Golden Ball as the best player at the World Cup. Ferran Torres went the opposite way, out of Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain, five weeks after scoring the goal that won the thing.

The net effect on where this squad plays its club football is small but real. At the tournament the 26 were spread across four leagues, 17 of them in Spain. They are now spread across three, 18 in Spain, six in England and two in France, with Germany dropping out of the list entirely when Grimaldo left Leverkusen.

Who are Spain’s key players?

Rodri is the captain and was named the best player at the tournament. He is a defensive midfielder who does not score much, four goals in 70 caps, and whose value shows up in what does not happen when he plays.

Lamine Yamal turned 19 in July and already has 33 caps and seven goals. He and Pau Cubarsi, also 19, were the two teenagers in the squad, and neither was there to make up numbers.

Unai Simon had the strangest tournament of any of them, which is covered below.

Mikel Oyarzabal is the squad’s leading scorer on 30 goals, ahead of Ferran Torres on 25. He scored the 86th-minute winner against England in the Euro 2024 final, from a Marc Cucurella cross, which is worth noting because that is four of this squad in one passage of play: Lamine Yamal made the opener for Nico Williams earlier the same evening. Spain’s last two major finals were settled by goals from two men on this list.

Pedri and Mikel Merino did the running around Rodri. Merino and Dani Olmo share the highest goal tally in the squad by anyone who is not a forward, 12 each, and it was Merino’s goal in the first minute of stoppage time that knocked Portugal out.

How Spain won the 2026 World Cup

Round	Opponent	Result
Group	Cape Verde, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay	7 points, 2 wins and a draw
Round of 32	Austria	Won 3-0
Round of 16	Portugal	Won 1-0
Quarter-final	Belgium	Won 2-1
Semi-final	France	Won 2-0
Final	Argentina	Won 1-0 after extra time

Add up the goals against column and you get one. Spain conceded a single goal in eight matches, to Charles De Ketelaere in the quarter-final, and that goal ended something that had been running for three and a half years. Unai Simon went 650 minutes at World Cups without being beaten, the longest such run in the tournament’s history. It broke Walter Zenga’s 517 minutes from 1990, a record that had stood for 36 years. The streak had started in Qatar; the last man to score past Simon at a World Cup before De Ketelaere was Japan’s Ao Tanaka, on 1 December 2022.

The final was goalless for 98 minutes and barely a contest for most of them. Argentina did not register a single shot in the 90, a first for a World Cup final, and Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute in front of 80,663 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. Spain’s second World Cup, 16 years after the first.

Why this was not the squad you would have picked to win it

Spain took the 36th most experienced squad of the 48 that entered the tournament, measured by total international caps. Their 26 had 743 between them at kick-off. Argentina, whom they beat in the final, had 1,251. Portugal, whom they knocked out in the last 16, had 1,160. Panama had the most of anyone, 1,541.

Nobody in the Spain squad had 100 caps. Eighteen of the 48 squads could say that, so it is not unique, but it is unusual company for a team that wins the thing: Rodri’s 62 at the start of the tournament was the most any Spaniard had. On average age Spain were the ninth youngest of the 47 squads whose birthdates are published in full, at 26.7 years measured to 24 September.

What they had instead of experience was concentration. Seventeen of the 26 played in La Liga and eight of them played for Barcelona, which was the largest group any club from a top-five European league sent to the tournament. Bayern Munich sent six to Germany, Atletico Madrid six to Argentina, Paris Saint-Germain five to France. Only Slavia Prague, with ten in the Czech Republic squad, sent more anywhere.

What is Spain’s record in major tournaments?

Two World Cups, in 2010 and 2026, and four European Championships, in 1964, 2008, 2012 and 2024, which is more than any other country. They also won the Nations League in 2023. Spain and France are the only two nations to have won all three of those competitions.

The France detail is worth its own line, because it is now a pattern rather than a coincidence. Spain have knocked France out at the semi-final stage of three consecutive major tournaments: Euro 2024, the 2025 Nations League and the 2026 World Cup. The French press has taken to calling Spain their bete noire, which is about as close to a compliment as that phrase gets.

The one recent scar belongs to Portugal. In the 2025 Nations League final in Munich, Portugal drew 2-2 with Spain after extra time and won 5-3 on penalties, with Zubimendi and Oyarzabal scoring the Spanish goals and Alvaro Morata missing the decisive kick. Thirteen months later Spain put Portugal out of the World Cup. Across the whole 42-match history between them Spain lead 18 wins to six with 18 draws, and in competitive fixtures it is six to one.

What is next for Spain?

The 2026-27 Nations League, in League A Group 3 with Croatia, England and the Czech Republic. It opens against England on 26 September and runs to 15 November: Croatia on 29 September, the Czech Republic on 3 October, Croatia again on 6 October, the Czech Republic on 12 November and England on 15 November.

De la Fuente’s contract runs to Euro 2028 after an extension signed in January 2025, and the Spanish federation has said it wants to keep him to around 2030. That year is the reason: Spain co-host the 2030 World Cup with Portugal and Morocco. A manager who has won a European Championship and a World Cup being kept on to take a home tournament is not a hard sell.

Spain went top of the FIFA rankings on 20 July 2026, the day after the final, and were still there when this squad’s players scattered to their new clubs. For more on the sides they will be measured against, see our squad guides to Brazil and India.

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