How Vicente Del Bosque looked past Barcelona and Madrid to change Spain

There was very little to celebrate about Spain’s final group game victory over Australia at last summer’s World Cup. The world champions were the first country to be sent home from Brazil, and they wasted no time in fleeing Curitiba following the hollow, dead-rubber win against the Socceroos - heading straight to the airport from the Arena de Baixada. On the plane home, Vicente Del Bosque may well have passed on the in-flight movies and instead devised a plan for recovery.

Indeed, there was a quiet acceptance across the board that Spain - football’s greatest international team by some distance for six years or so - needed to change. Their performances in Brazil were insipid and so far removed from what had made them so dominant for so long, but how would Del Bosque make such adjustments?

Their Euro 2016 qualification campaign - which will conclude with what is for Spain a dead-rubber against Ukraine on Monday - has given an indication. While Del Bosque might not have completely revamped his squad, he has looked to induct a new generation into the first-team fold - but change has happened in a different manner to that which might have been expected just a few years ago.

Roughly a decade ago, when Luis Aragones took charge of international football’s perennial underachievers, Spain found itself on the brink of an imperial period - led by its two biggest clubs. At Barcelona and Real Madrid, homegrown cores sustained unprecedented success - both domestically and on the continent. Such achievement coincided with Spain’s rise to the top of the international game - although there was no coincidence about it.

But when his successor Del Bosque looked to evolve that team after last summer’s debacle at the World Cup, he couldn’t reap the same resources. The Spanish national team is no longer a Harlem Globetrotters-esque Barcelona and Real Madrid collective. They’re far more cosmopolitan than that now.

Of the 23-man squad taken to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Valencia provided 16 players. In contrast, of the squad in Kiev to face Ukraine this week only four play for Barcelona, with two team-members apiece contributed by Real Madrid and Valencia - and those three are the only Spanish clubs, along with Athletic Bilbao, to have provided more than one player for the Euro 2016 qualifier.

Such composition illustrates a certain shift in the way the Spanish national team now sources its talent. Barcelona in particular no longer provides La Roja with the best in technically adept, inherently dynamic players in the way it once did, with Real Madrid’s homegrown core now somewhat weakened too following the tempestuous exit of Iker Casillas.

And so players from the lower echelons of La Liga have been given their chance. Since the group stage departure from last summer’s World Cup, Del Bosque has introduced the likes of Espanyol’s Ruben Duarte and Kiko Casilla (now of Real Madrid), Nolito and Jonny Castro of Celta Vigo and Bruno of Villarreal into his Spain squad, with Sergio Rico and Vitolo - both of Sevilla - also regular fixtures.

With Spain’s Clasico rivals in the midst of a transfer market arms race, giving little regard for self-sustainability, Del Bosque has looked to slightly peripheral talent pools - although with Villarreal currently sitting top of La Liga, and Celta Vigo third, such call-ups are entirely deserved. It’s where the future of international football’s most illustrious team can be found.

Barcelona have compensated for the drying up of the pipeline at La Masia by plundering the transfer market for the best available players - Neymar and Luis Suarez, to name a couple. The Spanish national team can’t exactly do that, and so Del Bosque has been forced to look further down the Liga ladder to rejuvenate his team. Against Ukraine, with La Roja’s Euro 2016 passage already secured, such talent might get their chance to impress from the start.

Spain have won eight out of nine qualifiers ahead of next summer’s European Championships, and yet there remains a hint of awkwardness about this campaign. Del Bosque’s side still boasts the strongest - and most decorated - spine in international football, but La Roja are still a team in transition right now. What exact form they will take in France next summer is something of a work-in-progress.

Xavi Hernandez is gone, as is David Villa, Xabi Alonso, Carles Puyol and Fernando Torres. Andres Iniesta’s absence in Kiev is down to a hamstring injury, but he too - at 31-years-old - is another who will surely be handed a pipe and slippers before the 2018 World Cup. With every squad announcement, with every evolution, Spain slowly accepts that their golden generation is greying a little more.

Don’t feel too sorry for them, though. The likes of Bruno, Jonny and in particular Nolito are still exceptional and mostly young (although not so in 28-year-old Nolito’s particular case) talents. It’s just that Del Bosque might not be spotted at the Camp Nou or the Santiago Bernabeu too often from now on.