De la Fuente urges focus on Belgium as Spain eyes World Cup semifinal

Luis de la Fuente built Spain’s run on a Y si sí kind of belief, but he refused to let that confidence drift beyond Belgium. Spain beat Belgium 2-1 with Mikel Merino’s 87th-minute winner after Fabián Ruiz opened the scoring in the 29th minute and Charles De Ketelaere equalized in the 40th, sending Spain into only its second World Cup semifinal.

De la Fuente had spent the buildup insisting that only Belgium existed in his mind, even with France already waiting on the other side of the bracket. He had watched France and judged it superior to Morocco, but he also made clear that any conversation about the semifinal could wait until the immediate task was finished. Spain arrived with all 26 players available, a detail that mattered as much as the message, because the coach said the squad’s work had given him calm.

That calm carried historical weight. De la Fuente became only the third Spain coach to take the national team into the world’s top four, after Guillermo Eizaguirre in 1950 and Vicente del Bosque in 2010. The achievement added another layer to a matchup with France that already carried a long memory for him: a loss to France in the 2013 European Under-19 final, a win over France in the 2015 Under-19 semifinal, and another victory over France in the 2019 Under-21 semifinal before Spain went on to win that tournament.

The optimism was not only tactical. In the documentary Forjados, De la Fuente said he had lived through 18 difficult months and felt outside football’s carousel, a stretch that was especially hard as a father watching the months pass without a job. He said he kept working until opportunities arrived and framed that period as one endured thanks to faith. That personal backdrop helps explain why his public confidence sounded less like bravado than conviction built through delay, loss and patience.

Spain’s semifinal against France was set for Tuesday in Dallas at 9 p.m., with La 1 and Dazn carrying the match. For De la Fuente, the stage had expanded, but the method had not: stay with the next opponent, trust the group in front of him and let the bigger history take care of itself.