How a high-performing, winning team was built — and why it looked so much like a regenerative process.

By Pedro Sáez Martínez — researcher and consultant in Strategic Design for Ecosocial Transitions.

A few weeks ago, Marc (co-founder of Monnou) and I were talking about Monnou’s methodology, «Regeneración Creativa». About how, more often than not, it’s a long-term bet, and it takes patience. We don’t begin by designing a strategy or a business model, and much less by designing a product or a ready-made solution to hand over to the client, the territory, or whoever the beneficiary might be. On the contrary, we begin by articulating a situated study of the context. Where we are, what the economic, political and technological situation looks like… And we also begin by articulating the right actors. The team, the people and the organizations that will later be able to genuinely develop the best solutions.

Marc mentioned that one reference point for this approach had been De la Fuente. At first he was criticized for not including a single star in his Spain men’s national football team. How could he not call up one of the great stars of Real Madrid or Barça? And yet De la Fuente trusted his philosophy. His methodology. So he went on building a team with no towering individual personalities, but one that came together beautifully as a collective system. That took time, patience. Because putting a team like that together is also a work of teambuilding: creating relationships of trust, strong bonds. De la Fuente trusted his methodology, with a long-term vision, based on building a system rather than on the approaches that would prioritize faster solutions. And he built a team capable of winning the 2026 World Cup with clean, beautiful football — with style and elegance, winning hearts as the tournament went on.

But this article isn’t about football. De la Fuente didn’t sign solutions; he designed the conditions for a winning team to flourish. He worked like a strategic designer, with an outlook we could almost call regenerative.

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Buy the solution, or cultivate the conditions?

Whenever we set out to truly transform something, this question tends to surface.

When we want to adapt to a new market, reposition ourselves, improve the sustainability of our organization or our territory — the temptation appears: look for the quickest solution. Sign the most expensive star. And, why not, copy what worked for the folks next door. Buy the tool that promises to fix everything by next week. Of course, when almost everything is measured in quarters, no one feels comfortable arguing that the fruits will take years to arrive.

De la Fuente chose the opposite path, and it didn’t spare him criticism. Instead of signing stars, he decided to build a solid team based on relationships. Instead of buying ready-made talent and expecting immediate results, he bet on building a process. A system that would take time to bear fruit, but that, once it did, would be hard to replicate for a rival — even one with the biggest budget.

Winning came afterwards, as the consequence of well-tended ground. De la Fuente worked not so much like an engineer as like a gardener.

«Football is a team sport built by good people.» — Luis de la Fuente

⚪ And in your organization: are you buying solutions, or cultivating the conditions for them to appear?

Designing from place: the situated study and the actors

In Regenerative Design, as we often say, there’s a key idea: «designing from place» (Designing from Place). Beginning by understanding the territory, the organization, the system — from its actors, its resources and its patterns. The point is not to arrive with a predefined solution, but to build it from and with the place.

And in the case of the Spain men’s national team? The «place» this team grew from had been cultivated for more than a decade.

De la Fuente didn’t land in the senior squad from the outside. He’d been in the Federation’s youth ranks since 2013, shaping players and instilling values, step by step: European U-19 champion, gold at the Mediterranean Games, U-21 champion, Olympic silver in Tokyo. When he reached the senior team in 2023, he didn’t inherit strangers: he inherited players he had helped to develop himself. In fact, seven of the players who were at Tokyo 2020 under his charge went on to play the 2026 World Cup. They weren’t «different generations» succeeding one another. It was the same process, with the same people, at different stages of maturity.

And underneath, an ecosystem. The Federation doesn’t work alone: it links up with the academies of the big clubs — Barça’s La Masia, Madrid, Athletic, Villarreal, Valencia, Sevilla, Real Sociedad… — each with its own philosophy, and the Federation acting as an integrator of identity. Detection starts early, very early: at 13–14, with a national U-14 team created precisely to start transmitting the culture before the player is fully formed. And the coordination between the senior coach and the U-21 coach (Santi Denia) ensures that when a kid moves up a level, he already knows the system, the values and the language.

And here’s a distinction that can be key for any organization:

  • The talent market: the dominant model, the status quo. You acquire ready-made talent, integrate it, and expect fast results. You depend on your economic pulling power. Whoever has the most money wins.
  • The talent ecology: the Federation’s model. You create the conditions for talent to emerge and develop within your ecosystem. It takes time, infrastructure and coherence. But it produces talent that not only has technical quality: it already shares your identity.

Culture can’t be bought — which is why it’s a competitive advantage that’s very hard to buy with money. Lamine Yamal doesn’t play the way he plays just because he has extraordinary talent. He plays the way he plays because he went through La Masia from the age of 7, and through Spain’s youth ranks from 14.

Because that’s the crux: the individual star is almost always the visible tip of an iceberg of invisible collective work. Behind the talent that shines lie years of ecosystem, of training, of relationships. What you see is the player; what holds up the game is everything you don’t see.

⚪ In your organization: do you follow a market or an ecology model for talent?

Simple rules, complex system

«Everyone knows what they have to do from the age of nine.» — Zlatan Ibrahimović

Zlatan isn’t describing a complicated team. He’s describing a complex one.

A complicated system (a plane, a clock) can be taken apart, analyzed and optimized: its parts relate in predictable ways. A complex system (a natural ecosystem, a city, a high-performing team) produces something else: emergent behavior that’s hard to predict. Out of the interaction of its parts come results that no single part could produce on its own, and that no one designed explicitly. That’s what a living system does, and a sum of individuals doesn’t.

In a complex system you don’t have time to program every play and every decision. What you need are a few simple rules — shared and repeated until they become instinct — that can then generate sophisticated behaviors. Spain’s advantage was exactly that: its message doesn’t change with each call-up. It’s been the same for more than a decade. A shared playing identity, constant communication, a few non-negotiable values. Simple rules. Complex play.

And that coherence ends up showing on the scoreboard in the most emphatic way: Spain conceded a single goal in the entire tournament — a historic record — and strung together 649 minutes without anyone scoring against them. A defense like that isn’t held up by an individual; it’s held up by a system.

⚪ What are the simple rules that hold your team together? What behaviors do they generate?

Leadership that creates conditions (and doesn’t take center stage)

That image of the heroic leader: the genius who concentrates the vision, makes every decision, and monopolizes the spotlight. It’s the same myth as the visionary founder, the commander who creates his own reality. It’s a seductive myth, with deep cultural roots: that ideal of the sovereign individual who owes nothing to anyone.

Luckily for the team, De la Fuente took the opposite path. The coach used to quote Marcus Aurelius:

«What is bad for the hive is bad for the bee.» — Marcus Aurelius

The leader, in that Stoic view, exists to serve the system, not to serve himself from it. The individual is inseparable from the community: what harms the collective harms the individual. A distributed, service-minded leadership that doesn’t hog the spotlight, but creates the conditions for leadership to appear in many places at once.

You can see this in small gestures. When Lamine Yamal was called up for the first time, at 16, De la Fuente asked Nico Williams to look after him, to act as an older brother. And that relationship became one of the emotional cornerstones of the team. This is tending the ground: building the relationships.

This kind of architecture has a property that’s hugely valuable when you design with a systemic eye: resilience. If the heroic leader gets injured or fails, the system wobbles. If leadership is distributed, the system absorbs the shocks far better. Mikel Merino scored decisive goals in the round of 16 and the quarterfinals… from the bench. Ferran Torres scored the championship-winning goal in the final… as a substitute.

Here we can see functional redundancy: substitutes aren’t a plan B, a storeroom of lesser options. They’re trained in the same system, with the same demands, with the same understanding of the game. They’re part of the same organism. In organizations, redundancy often gets a bad name; it sounds like «inefficiency». But having several people capable of doing the essential things is precisely what lets you survive the unexpected.

⚪ What happens the day your team’s «Rodri» gets injured?

Diversity as architecture for success

Why not talk, too, about what the team represents. Lamine Yamal, son of a Moroccan father and a mother from Equatorial Guinea, raised in a working-class neighborhood of Mataró. Nico Williams, son of Ghanaian parents, whose mother crossed the desert barefoot to reach Spain. Dean Huijsen, who could have chosen the Netherlands or Belgium, and chose Spain. All under the same shirt.

This team’s diversity isn’t the fruit of a representation policy or of affirmative action. It’s the fruit of a detection system that looks for talent wherever it is, without identity filters, and of integration conditions that let that diverse talent express itself. And it works very well.

And this has an explanation that goes beyond the beauty of the story. Teams with greater diversity (of origins, of gender, of ways of seeing…) solve complex problems better than homogeneous ones. Sometimes even better than a group of more brilliant individuals who all think alike. Diversity is a structural advantage, because it brings perspectives a uniform group can’t generate. Each of us sees from a place. And a team made of many places has a fuller view. Of course, this could open up the question of gender in football… a contradiction that has been dragging on for decades, for centuries. At least, for now, we can say that Spain’s women’s national team also holds the world champion title, having won the tournament in Australia and New Zealand in 2023 — making Spain the first country to hold both the men’s and women’s World Cup crowns at the same time.

The lack of gender equity in football could certainly be another topic worth discussing. The unbalanced representation of men’s and women’s sport. This article doesn’t focus on it, but it’s worth flagging, since we’re talking about diversity.

The victory of a diverse team doesn’t resolve the social tension around it; if anything, it reveals it. That reactions questioning the «Spanishness» of some of these kids appeared in the middle of the tournament reminds us that this issue still stirs debate in Spanish society.

⚪ What kind of diversity is present in your team?

Let us know your thoughts!

The individual vs. the collective in regenerative organizational design

Throughout history, various thinkers have voiced their concern that the «collective» system might crush the capacities — and even the rights — of the individual. Ayn Rand is probably a paradigmatic author in this respect. So too could be Friedrich Hayek. Where Marcus Aurelius said that «what is bad for the hive is bad for the bee», Ayn Rand argues that the bee does not exist to work for the hive. That the individual is an end in themselves, never a means to the group’s ends; that no one owes their life, their talent or their effort to any hive; and that subordinating the person to the collective — in the name of the common good, of sacrifice, or of solidarity — is the root of the greatest abuses. In her world, the one who creates and produces has no need to ask the whole for permission. Hayek would arrive at a similar wariness by another road: that no central mind can know what millions of individuals know in dispersed form, and that every attempt to design everything from the top down ends badly.

These aren’t concerns to be dismissed. The 20th century is full of collectives that, in the name of the whole, ground down individual people. But the case of this team suggests that this dichotomy between the individual and the collective may be poorly framed. Because the team designed not to depend on individualities turned out to be, precisely, the one that produced the greatest individualities of the tournament. Rodri won the Ballon d’Or. The award for best young player went to Pau Cubarsí, at 19. The Golden Glove for best goalkeeper, to Unai Simón. The team «without stars» took almost all the individual awards.

How does this work? A good system doesn’t crush the individual: it gives them the conditions for their own success. Security. Infrastructure. And those conditions, in fact, set them free. They let them thrive. A player inside a solid collective knows what they have to do, has cover when they fail, doesn’t carry the weight of the result alone. And that safety net is exactly what lets them dare, take risks, create. Express the best of themselves.

Regenerative design has a precise word to undo that false dilemma: holon. A holon is, at once, a complete whole in itself and a part of a greater whole. The term was coined by Arthur Koestler, and Gideon Kossoff places it at the heart of the transition to sustainable societies (Holism and the reconstitution of everyday life, 2015). The cell is part of an organ, and at the same time a whole valuable in its own right; the tree is a whole, and it’s part of the forest. The bee, of course, is a whole, and at the same time part of the hive.

Rodri is a full individual — with his talent, his judgment, his biography — and, at the same time, a part of the team that makes no sense without the rest. And the team is, in turn, a holon within a greater whole: the academy system, the Federation, even the country. When those levels hold one another up without crushing each other, the whole thing flourishes.

There are two very different ways of understanding «the whole». In one — the one Rand fears, and rightly so — the whole imposes itself on the parts, homogenizes them, reduces them to interchangeable pieces in service of the hive: the individual as mere means. It’s the collective that devours. In the other, the whole emerges from the parts, which each build it from their difference: here the individual doesn’t dissolve, but is fulfilled by belonging. It’s the collective that makes things flourish. What Rand denounces happens in systems of the first kind. What De la Fuente built is, fully, of the second.

And there, it seems to me, is the lesson a football team can offer anyone who designs organizations, teams or territories. De la Fuente didn’t sign solutions: he cultivated the conditions for something great to flourish. He worked like a gardener, not an engineer. He started with the place, articulated the actors, wove relationships of trust, and had the patience to sustain it all for more than a decade — even when they were asking him for the star and the shortcut.

It’s no accident that, on top of winning, he won beautifully: with clean, elegant football that stirred sympathy. The beauty of that game was the visible surface of a foundation of process, of care, of coherence. When the foundation is solid, the form turns beautiful almost of necessity. Ethics and aesthetics, once again, hand in hand.

⚪ And you: are you building a team that needs heroes to function, or are you designing the conditions so that any of your people could become one?

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