Spain Aim To Be First World Champions In 88 Years To Win Olympic Gold

Spain will make their debut at the Olympic Football Tournament this week aiming to become the first-ever reigning women’s World Cup champions to win a Gold medal.

Four of the previous seven editions of the Women’s Olympic Football Tournament, first played at the Atlanta Games in 1996, have been won by the four-time World Cup winners, the United States.

Yet remarkably, none of those Olympic Golds – in 1996, 2004, 2008 and 2012 – have come on the back of them winning the FIFA Women’s World Cup – in 1991, 1999, 2015 and 2019. They did hold both titles for a year in 2015, winning the World Cup as reigning Olympic Gold medalists, but were eliminated by Sweden on penalties in the following summer’s Olympic Football Tournament at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.

On the men’s side, the World Cup/Olympic Gold double has proved equally elusive since the Second World War. The last nation to achieve the feat was Italy in 1936. Having won the men’s World Cup on home soil in 1934, they also retained the trophy in 1938, a treble of global titles also achieved by Uruguay, who won two Olympic Golds in 1924 and 1928, followed by victory in the first-ever FIFA World Cup in 1930.

Since winning the Women’s World Cup last summer, Spain has won every other title available to them. They have come out on top in both editions of the new UEFA Women’s Nations League and claimed the number one position in the FIFA Women’s World Rankings, which they hold going into their first-ever Women’s Olympic Football Tournament.

They also arguably now possess a stronger squad than the one which won the FIFA Women’s World Cup last summer. The 22-player squad which travelled to France yesterday includes three players – Laia Aleixandri, Lucía García and Patri Guijarro – who refused to play for the national team under previous head coach Jorge Vilda.

Spain begin their Olympic campaign on Thursday against the 2011 world champions Japan, a team which humbled them last summer in the group stage of their ultimately successful World Cup campaign. With a series of devastating counter-attacks, Japan thrashed the eventual world champions 4-0 in Wellington, a result which demonstrated that Spain are fallable.

Going into that game, both teams had already qualified for the knockout stages of the competition and since winning the World Cup, Spain has also suffered Nations League defeats to Italy and the Czech Republic after securing top spot in their group.

This time, the stakes are higher for Spain against Japan with matches against the nine-time African champions, Nigeria, and eight-time South American champions, Brazil, still to come within a week. Only the top two in each group are guaranteed progression into the knockout quarter-finals.

Spain’s head coach Montse Tomé explained that the key to ensuring Spain are not once more cut to shreds by the Japanese on the break is “adjusting the attack-defence balance.”

She added that “our job is to analyse the opponent to come up with a match plan and for the players to be convinced of what we have to do, but we have to be prepared for any change.”

The world champions left their training base in Spain at Las Rozas, just outside of Madrid, to fly to Nantes, the venue of their first two matches in the Olympic Games. The Stade de la Beaujoire holds painful memories for the Spanish men’s national team who lost their opening match of the 1998 World Cup at the ground to Nigeria. 26 years on, the women’s team will also meet Nigeria in Nantes on Sunday.

Tomé described her players as “a team that loves what they do, that they have to work, work and work and that within the work comes the enjoyment so that their talent shines and they can be competitive, which they are.”