Paris Saint-Germain took home the trophy, but Spanish soccer won 2026 UEFA Super Cup

Coaching as quality control

There are three finals of European club soccer: the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League. In 2026, four of the six coaches represented in those finals—PSG's Enrique, Arsenal's Mikel Arteta, Aston Villa's Emery and Rayo Vallecano's Inigo Perez—hailed from Spain.

That wasn't a coincidence. The Spanish football federation has been intentional about coach development for a full generation. Luis de la Fuente, the coach who led the Spanish national team to its World Cup victory this summer, began his career as a teacher of young coaches; his World Cup opponent, Argentina's Lionel Scaloni, passed through his classroom as a young man.

German World Cup winner Philipp Lahm wrote eloquently in the Guardian about this phenomenon, and he capped it off with a valuable and oft-overlooked truism: the quality of the coaches determines the quality of the sport. Spain's focus on turning out high-quality leaders with shared tactical principles (like defending with the ball, aggressive out-of-possession pressing and the value of the collective) has raised the quality, and indeed the parity, of European soccer across the board. PSG and Villa proved it at the Super Cup: the two teams are far from international peers, but their shared belief in well-executed Spanish principles, executed by well-educated Spanish coaches, made them look like equals on the field.

A very roja future

Enrique's PSG, Emery's Aston Villa, Arteta's Arsenal and Perez's Rayo Vallecano made it to Europe's biggest stages in 2025-26, but they're not the only Spaniard-led teams capable of making waves in 2026-27. Andoni Iraola's Liverpool, Xabi Alonso's Chelsea and Cesc Fabregas's Como look like real challengers in their domestic leagues.

The international community is waking up to the value of Spanish coaching too. The Dutch soccer federation hired Spanish legend Xavi to rebuild its national team following its early exit at the 2026 World Cup. Proud, historic soccer nations don't tend to hire foreign coaches for their national teams, but Spain's excellence in the field is such that Xavi's appointment was met with near-universal approval in the Netherlands.

Spain didn't just win the World Cup in 2026: it won hands-on leadership of the global game through its stellar network of homegrown coaches. Enrique and Emery's Super Cup battle proved they're two of its brightest exports, but there are many, many more intelligent coaches coming up behind them and asking important questions about the future of European soccer. It's Spain's game now. We're all just playing it.