Spain Unbeaten Run Hits 37 to Equal Italy's All-Time Record — and Number 38 Would Stand Alone

Inside the Spain unbeaten run: 28 wins, nine draws and a shootout asterisk

The Spain unbeaten run breaks down as 28 wins and 9 draws — a sequence that reads DWWWWWWWWWD across its first eleven games and closes, as of now, with six straight victories. That 75.7% win rate is the detail worth holding onto. Long unbeaten streaks are often padded with cagey draws; this one has been built mostly by winning.

The last team to beat Spain in any fixture was Colombia, 1-0 in a London friendly in March 2024. Four days later La Roja drew 3-3 with Brazil, and the counter has been running ever since.

The last competitive defeat sits even further back: Scotland, 2-0 at Hampden Park in March 2023, in Euro 2024 qualifying. By that stricter measure, Spain's competitive unbeaten stretch is longer still — the Colombia friendly is the only interruption between Hampden and today.

Two of the nine draws carry an asterisk worth explaining. Record-keeping treats matches decided on penalties as draws, so the 2025 Nations League final against Portugal — 2-2, lost in the shootout — counts as an unbeaten result, as does the shootout Spain won against the Netherlands in that competition's quarter-final. Purists can grumble about the Portugal night; the ledger doesn't.

What the sequence contains is harder to argue with:

• The Euro 2024 title, won with seven wins from seven — the first team to sweep every match at a European Championship.
• Home-and-away Nations League ties against the Netherlands and a semi-final win over France on the road to the 2025 final.
• An unbeaten World Cup qualifying campaign and, now, a clean knockout march through the expanded 48-team format in North America.

The team that ended Italy's record now shares it

There is a neat loop in who Spain have just caught. Italy's 37-game run stretched from October 2018 to October 2021 under Roberto Mancini, peaked with the Euro 2020 title at Wembley, and shattered the previous record of 35 held jointly by Brazil (1993–96) and — yes — Spain (2007–09).

And who ended it? Spain. A 2-1 win at San Siro in the October 2021 Nations League semi-final, with Ferran Torres scoring both. The side that stopped the record run has now matched it, and can become the first to pass it.

The Italian comparison also carries a caution. Mancini's streak was bracketed by the two darkest results in the country's modern history: it began months after Italy missed the 2018 World Cup, and within six months of it ending the Azzurri had lost a playoff to North Macedonia and missed the 2022 World Cup too. A record unbeaten run and consecutive absences from the sport's biggest stage coexisted in the same era — proof that streaks measure consistency, not destiny.

Spain's version, by contrast, is being stress-tested in the one arena Italy's never reached: deep in a World Cup knockout bracket, where a single off night ends both the streak and the tournament.

A third-tier club CV, a first-tier international record

The manager presiding over all 37 games has one of the stranger résumés in elite football. Luis de la Fuente never managed a club above Spain's third tier. His route ran through the Spanish federation's youth system instead: a European U19 title in 2015, a U21 title in 2019, and Olympic silver in 2021, before he inherited the senior side in December 2022 after the Qatar exit.

The early returns were shaky — the Hampden defeat came in his second competitive window — and the appointment was widely read as a low-cost interim measure. Thirty-seven unbeaten matches, a European Championship and a Nations League final later, that reading has not aged well.

The mechanism behind the run is unglamorous but consistent: Spain's traditional possession dominance now sits on top of a defence that concedes very little, which is why so many of these 37 games have felt lower-stress than knockout football usually allows. Teams that control the ball and the penalty area rarely lose; the trick is doing it for two and a half years without a slip. De la Fuente's Spain have managed exactly that, across friendlies, qualifiers, two Nations League campaigns, a Euros and a World Cup.

It also reframes the old assumption that international management is a retirement posting for decorated club coaches. The two longest unbeaten runs in men's international history now belong to Mancini, a serial club winner, and a man whose club ceiling was Segunda B. There is evidently more than one way in.

Number 38 goes through the final

The equaliser came against familiar opposition. Number 37 was the 2-0 semi-final win over France — the third time La Roja have beaten Les Bleus inside this streak, after the 2-1 Euro 2024 semi-final and the 5-4 Nations League epic of June 2025. France had become the recurring checkpoint on the run, and now the checkpoint that drew Spain level with Italy.

The record cannot sit shared for long. Number 38 is the World Cup final on Sunday, July 19 at MetLife Stadium, against England or Argentina. Avoid defeat there and the record is Spain's alone — set not in a friendly or a qualifier but in a World Cup final, with a second world title to go with 2010 riding on the same ninety minutes.

There is a scenario where the streak and the trophy diverge, of course. A draw followed by a shootout defeat would extend the record and lose the World Cup in the same evening — the Portugal final of 2025 replayed at the highest stakes. That is the quiet flaw in unbeaten-run arithmetic, and Spain know it firsthand.

But the cleaner reading is this: Italy needed 37 games to set the standard and never got to defend it at a World Cup. Spain matched it inside one — and can break it in the final itself. Whatever happens on Sunday, the number 37 now has two owners; only one of them still has the ball rolling.