An essay by Ron Hogsett, drafted Monday, July 13, 2026.
Spain was not always Spain. For most of the twentieth century, the national team was called La Furia, the fury, and the name was accurate. Spanish football was direct, physical, brave, and it went home early. Between 1950 and 2006, a country obsessed with the game reached only one World Cup semifinal.
The team that now passes opponents into submission spent five decades as the sport’s most reliable disappointment.
Then Spain decided to become something else. Not hoped, but decided. A generation of educators, many of them shaped by Cruyff’s ideas at Barcelona, rebuilt the country’s coaching schools, its youth competitions, and its definition of a good young player. The youth national teams started winning everything in the 1990s. The senior team followed: European champions in 2008, world champions in 2010, European champions again in 2012, again in 2024. On Friday night in Inglewood, a Spain squad whose two teenage starters were formed entirely inside that system beat Belgium 2-1 to reach another World Cup semifinal, unbeaten now in 36 matches, the longest run in the federation’s history, and the first reigning European champion to reach the last four of a World Cup since Spain’s own 2010 side.
I have written twice this week about examinations. Belgium examined the United States in Seattle, and the result was 4-1 in favor of the examiners’ reserves. Spain examined Belgium in Inglewood, out-created them 2.08 to 0.37 in expected goals, conceded their first World Cup goal in 649 minutes after the longest clean-sheet run the competition has ever seen, and ended the argument with the bench. This essay is not another autopsy. This is the opposite. Spain is the proof that a footballing nation can re-engineer itself inside twenty years, and the mechanics of how they did it are not secret, not cultural magic, and not expensive. They are choices. Here are eight the United States could make.
One caution first, because it determines how every lesson below should be read. What the world sees when Spain plays is passing, and what America will be tempted to copy is passing. But the pass is a byproduct. It is the last visible link in a chain that begins with a player’s total command of the ball under pressure: the first touch that kills a difficult ball, the body shape that protects possession, the ability to beat a man when the passing lane closes. Spain does not pass well because it drills passing patterns. Spain passes well because every player on the field is functionally technical, meaning technical at all times, under any conditions, with whatever skill the moment demands, and passing is simply what such players choose most often.
Please note the distinction here, as it is significant: the counterfeit is not a hypothetical scenario; it is already the American Saturday. Our children pass early and often, partly because the grown men they watch on television pass, partly because the quick release is what draws praise from the sideline. But watch closely, and the difference announces itself.
For Spain’s players the pass is a choice made from abundance. For most American children it is an escape from a ball they have never been taught to command. And a pass made in escape does not hold its shape. Within a few seasons, it degrades into the ball kicked forward, and the match into an athletic battle of speed, strength, and size, which is how a nation that constantly talks about possession came to play almost none of it. The lessons below are about building the technique. The passing arrives on its own.
#### Lesson one: The admission comes first
Every reform on this list is available to American soccer today, and none of them will matter without the one that has to come first, because it is not a policy, it’s an admission.
Germany’s modern era did not begin with an academy mandate. It began after the humiliation of Euro 2000, when a proud federation said in public that its way of developing players had failed, and that the people administering it, sincere, hardworking, decorated people, had presided over the failure. The academies came second. The humility came first. Spain’s transformation required the same act: La Furia had its defenders, men with caps and trophies who believed in the old virtues, and the new Spain was built over their objections.
The United States has not had that moment. Our instinct after every exit is to defend the curve. The results are coming, the pool is deeper, the athletes are better than ever. Seattle should end that. The coaches and officials who administer American soccer are not villains, and most of them have given their lives to the game. But sincerity is not correctness, and the stewards of a system cannot repair what they will not admit they built. A paradigm does not shift when a committee adjusts it. It shifts when the people inside it accept that the way they have been teaching, selecting, licensing, and rewarding is itself the obstacle, and that a better way exists and has existed for decades, playing on our televisions every summer.
Germany’s admission is remembered now as the first day of its triumph. Ours is still available. Everything below walks through that door or through nothing.
#### Lesson two: Send the best teachers to the youngest players
In Spain, coaching small children is a profession. The licenses are rigorous, the courses are affordable, and the coach running a town’s eight-year-olds has often studied the game more formally than many American coaches working with paid academy teenagers. Spain treats the education of coaches as public infrastructure. America treats it as a revenue line, pricing its top licenses at figures that lock out exactly the people most likely to spend their lives on a grass field with children.
The American pyramid is inverted. Our most qualified coaches climb toward college programs and professional benches, because that is where the money and status live, while the ages that actually determine a player’s technical ceiling are staffed by volunteers and by whoever answered the email. Spain understood that the years from five to twelve are not a waiting room before real coaching begins. They are the entire foundation. A federation serious about 2034 would make the under-ten job prestigious, licensed, and paid, and would drop the price of elite coaching education to the cost of a set of textbooks.
#### Lesson three: The small court is the great teacher
Ask where Spanish technique physically comes from and the answer is unglamorous: small spaces. Futsal courts, playground walls, five-a-side cages, training areas deliberately compressed. I have been making this argument in print for years, and it is written into the curriculum I teach, because the math underneath it is not subtle. A child in a futsal match touches the ball several times more often than a child lost on a full-size field, and every touch happens with an opponent close enough to punish a heavy first contact. There is no hiding place on a futsal court. There is no way to accumulate playing time without accumulating technique. If you know anything about Forms’ Methodology or me, you know this is a non-negotiable in our curriculum.
Multiply that difference in touches by ten years of childhood and you get the gap everyone saw in Seattle. The beautiful part is how cheap the fix is. America does not need a hundred new stadiums. It needs goals and painted lines in gyms it already owns, and a winter culture in which futsal is the default rather than a novelty. Of everything on this list, this is the reform a school district could start on Monday.
#### Lesson four: Let them dribble
Now the lesson I have paid for personally, so I will state it unapologetically. American coaching culture punishes the precise behavior that produces world-class players.
For years I have been criticized, sometimes loudly, for encouraging young children to dribble. To take on one defender, and when that is mastered, two, and then three. The charge is always the same: this ignores soccer IQ, because the seven-year-old had a teammate open, and the smart play is the pass. I have watched children corrected, benched, and labeled selfish for attempting the very actions that a top European curriculum formation treats as the heart of the curriculum.
The criticism has the developmental journey exactly backward. A child who spends the years from six to twelve accumulating thousands of duels is not learning selfishness. He is acquiring, repetition by repetition, a command of the ball so complete that it stops requiring his eyes. And that is the hinge of everything, because a player who no longer looks down at his feet has his head up, and a player with his head up sees. He scans earlier, recognizes patterns sooner, reads the next three seconds of the match instead of the current one. Then maturity arrives and does what maturity does. The teenager who can beat anyone begins choosing when beating someone serves the team, and the pass appears in his game at last, not out of fear, but out of purpose. That is the passing you see from Spain’s adults.
Senior internationals do not dribble into four opponents, and pointing at them to justify coaching seven-year-olds the same way mistakes the finished building for the construction site.
Spain’s men pass like Spain because Spain’s children were allowed to dribble like children. There is a neurological layer to this that American development has barely begun to take seriously. Technical actions rehearsed to true automaticity stop consuming conscious attention, and whatever the brain no longer spends on controlling the ball, it reallocates to perception. This is what coaches are actually describing when they say the game has slowed down for a player. The game did not slow down. The player’s operating system sped up, built in childhood, duel by duel, until the ball became something closer to a body part than a tool. In chaotic situations that sink most players, this is the difference between drowning and seeing.
What Americans call soccer IQ is, in large part, simply attention that technique has set free. A national program serious about elite adults would train this deliberately, as curriculum, from the first year. Almost no one in American soccer does. It is the largest unclaimed advantage in the sport.
Allowing freedom at a young age is not a permissive luxury. It is the mechanism for the paradigm-shifting change we all want but seem unwilling to pursue. Restrict the dribble at seven and you have not taught decision-making. You have canceled the process by which decision-making becomes possible.
#### Lesson five: Stop selling the wrong product
The deepest structural problem in American youth soccer is not effort or money. It is who the customer is. In the pay-to-play economy, the customer is the parent, and parents, reasonably, buy what feels like progress: winning weekends, trophies, trips. So clubs sell winning, and the fastest route to winning at ten years old is athleticism and long balls, which is precisely the football that produces nothing at twenty.
In Spain the economics point the other way. Clubs large and small are compensated when players they developed move upward, so the product is the player, and the incentive is patience. Spanish clubs profit from the years of Cubarsi’s formation. An American club profits from his parents’ checkbook until he quits. Until American clubs are paid for what a player becomes rather than what a family spends, the system will keep manufacturing exactly what it is incentivized to manufacture. The mechanisms exist in FIFA’s own regulations. Using them fully is a decision.
#### Lesson six: Protect the small ones
Line up the midfielders who made Spain the standard: Xavi, Iniesta, Silva, Pedri. Nearly every one of them would have been filtered out of an American academy at eleven for being too small. Our identification system selects for early puberty, then wonders a decade later why the player pool is full of athletes who cannot receive on the half-turn. Spain’s selectors were taught to watch for something else: the first touch under pressure, the scan before receiving, the child who wants the ball when the game is difficult. Physical maturity was treated as a date-of-birth problem, not a talent problem.
The United States possesses the largest, most diverse athletic population on earth, and it systematically discards the portion of it most likely to produce its Pedri. Reforming this costs nothing. It requires only that the people choosing ten-year-olds be trained to value what a ten-year-old’s technique predicts rather than what his body currently does.
#### Lesson seven: One language from six to twenty-six
Watch how Spain substitutes. On Friday, level in a World Cup quarterfinal, they removed their goalscorer and introduced Pedri. In the 86th minute they introduced Merino, who has now won consecutive knockout rounds with a total of sixteen touches. This is not luck and it is not depth in the roster-size sense. Every player arriving from that bench was formed by the same footballing language, so the team’s level does not drop when the names change.
That coherence is a curriculum outcome. A Spanish player meets broadly the same game model, the same training priorities, the same definition of a good decision, from his first licensed coach to the national team. An American player can pass through four clubs and meet four philosophies before high school. The federation that aligned its coaching education, its youth leagues, and its national teams around one technical doctrine would not see results in two years. It would see them in twelve, all at once, the way Spain did.
#### Lesson eight: Patience as policy
The uncomfortable lesson underneath the other seven is temporal. Spain’s reforms began in earnest more than a decade before the 2008 breakthrough. Germany’s rebuild, begun with the admission of 2000, waited fourteen years for the World Cup it produced. There is no version of this that arrives by 2028. A federation, like a club, like a parent, has to be willing to plant trees whose shade belongs to someone else’s tournament.
American soccer’s instinct after Seattle will be to change the coach, restructure the league calendar, and commission a report. Spain’s history says the real work is quieter and slower: an admission, then teachers, small courts, freedom, incentives, selection, one curriculum, and then years of holding the line while the results lag the reforms. The countries that endured that lag now play in the semifinals. The countries that kept reorganizing the top of the pyramid keep meeting them there.
The part I will only mention once and I’ll say plainly why I trust these eight lessons: I have spent thirteen years testing them on American soil, with American children, in a school built around the conviction that technique is the curriculum, and that the purpose of a footballing education is to produce players who are functionally technical, adaptable, and portable, players whose game survives any coach, any system, any country. I watch daily what happens when a seven-year-old from Texas is given the same football diet as a seven-year-old from Barcelona. The diet works here. The children are not the problem and never were.
But this essay is not an advertisement for my academy, and I would ask readers not to treat it as one. The methods above do not belong to me or to Spain. They are available to any club, any school district, any state association, and any federation willing to choose them, and the entire point of writing this is that they should be chosen at a scale far beyond anything one school can touch.
#### So what will you choose to do?
So consider this a working paper with no invoice attached. If you run a club, start with the courts and the coaching. If you sit on a state board, start with the incentives and the selection criteria. And if you work at the federation, the eight lessons above are the short version; the long version is a conversation I would be honored to have, and so would a hundred other American educators who have been quietly building toward this for years.
Spain was not born knowing what it knows. It learned, deliberately, admitted what had to be admitted, and then taught its children, and on Tuesday in Arlington the children will play France for a place in a World Cup final. There is nothing in that sentence the United States could not one day write about itself.
The distance between losing to Belgium’s reserves and dismantling Belgium’s best is not measured in tactics, scheduling, or spending. It is crossed on ten thousand quiet mornings with a ball, by children whose coaches understood that the ball is not a tool for playing the game. It is the curriculum itself. The decision, as it was for Spain, is ours.