Euro 2024: Bishops highlight the faith of the coach of Spain’s victorious soccer team

Luis de la Fuente, Spanish national soccer coach. / Credit: Royal Spanish Football Federation

Seville, Spain, Jul 15, 2024 / 17:20 pm (CNA).

Following Spain’s 2-1 victory over England yesterday to clinch its fourth European Championship, several Spanish bishops have congratulated the country’s national soccer team and highlighted the Catholic faith of their coach, Luis de la Fuente.

The archbishop of Seville, José Ángel Saiz Meneses, extended his congratulations to the national team on X after it won the final this Sunday in Berlin.

Saiz noted that the national coach is “a deeply believing man, without complexes about publicly manifesting his faith and devotion to the Holy Christ of the Expiration,” a large crucifix in Seville which depicts Christ’s last breath as he dies on the cross.

For the archbishop, the coach “has known how to communicate faith, humility, the value of the team above individuality, the spirit of sacrifice, effort, trust.”

Also on X, the bishop of Orihuela-Alicante, José Ignacio Munilla, shared the coach’s witness to the faith, when questioned at a press conference by an atheist journalist about the role that God would play in the final match.

De la Fuente responded by pointing out that “faith is something personal and transferable” before explaining his case in particular: “Since I am free and I can choose what I believe I have to do, based on my intelligence and my experiences (…) well, they induce me to believe in God and give me a lot of assurance and a lot of strength.”

This public declaration of faith led the prelate to recall the words of Leo Messi after winning the soccer World Cup, who acknowledged: “I didn’t do anything, it was God who made me play like this.”

In reference to both testimonies of faith, Munilla added: “How can we not recall those words of Jesus?: ‘Whoever confesses me before men, I will also confess before the Father (Matthew 10:32).’”

In a post on X, the bishop of Vitoria, Juan Carlos Elizalde, congratulated the Spanish team along with the winner of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, Carlos Alcaraz, wishing “that many young people will follow you in the example of using free time for sports, teamwork, healthy competitiveness and effort and improvement to be better every day. You have given us an unforgettable afternoon!”

Other Catholic aspects of the Spanish team

Among the players that make up the winning Spanish national soccer team is long time veteran Jesús Navas, 38, whose family connection to the Neocatechumenal Way is known.

In 2010, when the Spanish national soccer team became world champion, Navas had written “God is love” on his cleats.

Among the youngest players selected by De la Fuente is Nico Williams, whose parents, coming from Ghana, arrived in Spain in 1994 after crossing the Sahara and managing to make it undetected into Melilla, a Spanish enclave on Morroco’s Mediterranean coast.  His mother was pregnant with his brother Iñaki, also a soccer player.

Finally they were sent to Bilbao in northern Spain, where Caritas helped them get established and the eldest of the Williams brothers, both players for Bilbao’s Athletic Club, was born. 

According to Iñaki Mardones, the volunteer who had the closest relationship with them from the beginning, the Williams “have lived their faith very intensely. First, the parents have entrusted, lived, and given the gift of baptism and communion to their children. Thus they have lived it. Furthermore, they hold their faith close and it accompanies them in their lives.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.