Luis de la Fuente: The Calmest Man in the Stadium
Executive Summary
What He Asked For in Dallas
A week before Spain won the World Cup, before the semifinal against France in Dallas, a correspondent from the Catholic wire ACI Prensa asked Luis de la Fuente what he asks God for at a moment like this. The coach of the tournament’s best team, one match from the final, answered like a man who had been asked about the weather: “health, especially — and that He give me options to keep fighting.”
Not victory. Not a trophy. Health, and the chance to stay in the fight. He went on to close the obvious loophole himself: he prays every day, he explained, not because there is a World Cup on, and not to obtain results — his first act on waking is to give thanks for his wellbeing and for life itself. He crosses himself before matches and is careful about what the gesture is not: not superstition, he insists, but faith. His devotions are specific in the old Iberian way — to the Cristo de la Expiración, the image Sevillans call El Cachorro, and to the Virgen de la Vega, patroness of Haro, the Rioja town where he was born.
Five days after that press conference, his team won the final. He would have been at Mass that morning either way.
The Long Way to the Touchline
It matters who is saying these things, because the résumé forbids the lazy reading. Faith as a crutch for the mediocre does not survive contact with this career.
De la Fuente was a professional at the top of Spanish football for a decade and a half: a left-back in the great Athletic Bilbao side that won consecutive league titles in 1983 and 1984, with later spells at Sevilla — where, one suspects, a Rioja boy first met El Cachorro — and Alavés. Then came the part nobody envies: a quarter of a century in the game’s second row, coaching youth sides at Athletic and then working his way up through the Spanish federation’s age groups. Under-19 European champion in 2015. Under-21 European champion in 2019. Olympic silver in Tokyo. When the federation promoted him to the senior job in December 2022, the appointment was greeted with shrugs — a youth-team functionary, said the consensus, in a chair that expected a star.
The functionary has since won the Nations League, the 2024 European Championship, and now the World Cup. Three finals, three trophies, in under four years. Whatever this man’s faith is doing to his competitive edge, it is not blunting it. The prayer itself gives the game away: he does not ask God for peace from the fight. He asks for the strength to stay in it.
Saying It Out Loud
There is a version of this story that would be unremarkable — a privately devout man, faith kept discreetly offstage. That is not the version. De la Fuente calls himself a practicing Catholic in press conferences, on camera, in a Spain where the pews have been emptying for two generations and where public religiosity in a national figure invites a specific kind of ridicule: not persecution, just the raised eyebrow, the implication that a serious professional should know better. The Archbishop of Seville has publicly described him as a deeply religious man unafraid of expressing his faith — and it is the lack of fear that is the story.
What strikes me most is the register. There is no culture war in him, no grievance, no recruiting speech. When a journalist put the hard question — where exactly is God and faith when a final demands everything and only winning counts — de la Fuente did not bristle. He answered that he understood the puzzlement perfectly, because he feels exactly the same when he contemplates atheism; faith, he added, is something personal. It is a complete inversion delivered without a raised voice: your bafflement at my belief is precisely my bafflement at your unbelief. The challenge goes home in the same envelope it arrived in, and everyone stays friends.
That is what professing a faith looks like when it costs something and the professor is unbothered by the cost. Courage in this register does not shout. It simply declines to hide.
The Fresh Perspective Hiding in an Old Practice
I keep returning to a thought I could not shake while watching the most Catholic final in World Cup history: the modern world has quietly rebuilt, at retail prices, fragments of what the old practice offered wholesale.
Consider what elite performance culture now prescribes for a man in de la Fuente’s chair. A morning gratitude routine, because gratitude demonstrably steadies the mind. A mindfulness practice, because attention needs training. A therapist or performance psychologist, because pressure needs somewhere to go. A careful separation of self-worth from outcomes, because outcome-fused identity is how strong people break. All of it sensible; I have recommended versions of it myself. Now look at the coach’s actual life: thanksgiving on waking, daily prayer regardless of circumstances, a weekly liturgy that relativizes everything on the calendar, devotions with faces and names, and a petition that explicitly refuses to request results. The entire toolkit is there — integrated, load-tested for centuries, and pointed at something larger than performance.
This is the fresh take hiding inside the supposedly dead practice. The absurdity of modern working life is not its pressure; pressure is old. The absurdity is asking the scoreboard to also be the judge of what a person is worth, which no scoreboard can carry. De la Fuente’s faith relocates the verdict. His worth is settled elsewhere, before kickoff, which is exactly why he can spend everything on the fight without being spent by it. He prepares like a maximalist and surrenders like a monk, and the two are not in tension — the surrender is what funds the ferocity.
Religious practice is not a museum exhibit that failed to notice its own closing time. On the evidence of this July, it is a working discipline for the exact pressures this age claims as its special burden — and the man on the touchline of the World Cup final, the calmest person in a building of eighty thousand, is what it looks like installed.
The world files his faith under nostalgia. He files it under equipment. After the month he has just had, his filing deserves a look.