The year is 2010. A Spain side stacked with star names have sneaked their way into the World Cup final, where they ultimately triumph in a bruising encounter against the Netherlands with an extra-time Andres Iniesta winner.
Fast forward 16 years and a more under-the-radar, but equally efficient, Spain team have again reached football’s showpiece.
The names may not trip off the tongue as smoothly as they did before, but Luis de la Fuente’s current contingent are driven to match the achievement of the country’s golden generation and lift the trophy for a second time on Sunday, 19 July.
Certain parallels are evident.
Take the continuity as both sides came into their respective World Cups having won the European Championship two years earlier.
For the team that triumphed in 2010, only three of the starting XI had not been at the 2008 Euros. Only two players who began Tuesday’s semi-final against France were not part of the successful squad at Germany 2024.
Interestingly, Spain’s 2026 squad of 26 players have an older average age than the group selected by Vicente del Bosque in 2010 (27.8 compared with 26.7), but they are less experienced on the international stage (33 caps on average against 56).
Spain had not won a World Cup knockout game since lifting the trophy in the South Africa tournament, before embarking on this run.
The vaunted 37-match unbeaten record of De la Fuente’s men is impressive – matching Italy’s world-best mark – even if it does discount a penalty shootout defeat by Portugal in last year’s Nations League final.
This Spain side are the first team to keep six clean sheets at a single World Cup.
So how do the two XIs compare? BBC Sport takes a look.
