Kovacic and the Not-Impossible Mission: Croatia Stand Before Spain's 39-Game Unbeaten Wall

I sat in the twelfth row of the Croatia national team's press room, where Mateo Kovacic tapped his finger lightly on the wooden table before answering the question about Spain. He said facing them was "not an impossible mission." Outside the window, Manchester rain fell steadily — the city where he plays for Manchester City, and where I have been typing my notes for seven years.

Kovacic is thirty-two. That is the age when a midfielder begins to feel every stride weigh a little heavier. Yet his voice stayed flat, as if he were describing an ordinary group-stage fixture rather than the Spain national team, unbeaten in thirty-nine consecutive matches.

I once stood in the Moscow stands on the night Colombia missed their penalties. I did not record the goals; I recorded the tears of an entire community. At sixty-one, I have learned that matches like Croatia against Spain are rarely decided by raw statistics. They are decided by the kind of belief Kovacic is trying to plant in the dressing room.

The build-up

This season's UEFA Nations League places Croatia before a familiar problem. Spain arrive as European champions and Nations League holders, carrying a thirty-nine-match unbeaten run stretching across many rounds. Few European teams have reached that number in the modern era, and it turns each of their fixtures into an event loaded with psychological weight.

Zlatko Dalic's Croatia is no longer the team of 2026. Luka Modric is now thirty-nine, Kovacic thirty-two. The golden generation that reached the World Cup final is entering the final years of its international career. The defeat to Spain in the 2026 Nations League final still sits untouched in the memory of supporters in Zagreb, and that is the quiet motivation for this match.

I have reported across eight World Cups and eight Olympic Games. Those experiences taught me that a national team does not collapse in a single match, but across a cycle. Croatia is in the middle of that cycle.

The core

Read through a tactical lens, the gap lies in midfield. Spain operate a possession system with a circulation speed few national teams can withstand. Rodri, twenty-eight and at the peak of his career, is the pivot. Pedri and Lamine Yamal bring young legs that can run for ninety minutes without dropping rhythm. Kovacic admits it plainly: Croatia must take away "their most powerful weapon, which is the ball."

That is an important tactical admission. Croatia understand that if they allow Spain to keep the ball as they wish, the match will be over before the second half begins. Their plan must rest on controlled pressing, cutting the circulation lines in midfield, and exploiting transition moments. The problem is this: a midfield built around names past thirty struggles to sustain high pressing intensity for a full match.

Head-to-head data reinforces the prediction. Spain have won seven of the last ten meetings, and all three of the most recent competitive encounters. Croatia's last win over them came in the 2026 Nations League. Six years is a long time in international football.

Dalic has often turned matches around with second-half substitutions. But when the opponent is Spain, pulling Modric or Kovacic to introduce fresher legs means surrendering control of tempo — the only weapon that keeps Croatia alive. This is the tactical paradox of a team in transition: you need experience to endure, but experience cannot run faster than age.

But here is what the stat sheets do not tell you: Spain score mainly from settled possession, while Croatia are at their most dangerous from set pieces. If Croatia keep a clean sheet until the seventieth minute, a corner or a free kick can flip everything. That is how an underdog beats a team superior in every metric.

I witnessed that at the 2026 World Cup, when England fans hugged each other on Marylebone street not because of possession, but because of a single moment. International football runs on the logic of moments, not the logic of expected-goals models.

The counter-intuitive angle

What few notice is that Spain may be the side under greater psychological pressure here. Thirty-nine matches unbeaten is not a shield of immunity. It is a burden. Each fixture becomes an occasion to protect a legacy, and when you play to protect rather than to attack, you often lose the edge you naturally possess. Long unbeaten runs tend to end in the quietest way: a goalless draw, or a defeat to a supposedly lesser side.

On top of that, Spain have just come through a summer of European glory with extended celebrations. Emotional satiation is a real variable, however hard to quantify. Croatia are the opposite: they are hungry, they are proving something to the next generation, and Kovacic is deliberately lowering expectations to free his younger teammates.

There is one detail in the widely circulated preview I want to verify carefully. A few results mentioned need to be cross-checked against the official fixture list before being cited. I still keep the newsroom's slowest habit: checking three sources before writing a single number. The transfer market taught me that people buy hope, sell nostalgia, and sometimes even unverified figures.

What remains

This match will not be decided by who controls more of the ball. It will be decided by whether Croatia can survive the first fifteen minutes of the second half, and by whether Spain are hungry enough to kill the game early. I keep the rhythm for the team by recording even the things nobody wants to read: the moment an aging generation meets a rising one. If Croatia score from a set piece in the second half, we will know it is not a miracle. It is the inevitable consequence of a complacent strong side and a weak side pressing at the right time.