Review of Team Spain at the WNC 2025
Team Spain 2025 Review
and our Plans For 2026
2025 Wow!! What a year it turned out to be.
From the inception and launch of Spain Walking International Football Teams in February 2023 through to the end of 2025, the journey has been spectacular and, at times, all-consuming.
2025 will be a year that our players, coaches, managers, and staff will never forget. It culminated in us hosting the FIWFA World Nations Cup in Torrevieja, of course, but before that, a lot of work and preparation was taking place on and off the pitch.
Our year in representative colours started with trials in Lanzarote, where our good friend and Canary Islands chief scout, Mr. Vic Locke, facilitated a weekend of football, and we got to see some new players. We made some inroads in February and March with trips to Asturias and Vigo, where I met up with a couple of Walking Football communities and contacts were made. Further trips to Madrid were taken, where we met the guys from Tres Cantos, who share our enthusiasm for the sport and are a driving force for Walking Football in the capital.
Our trips north ended with four players representing Team Spain at the WNC in both the men’s and women’s teams.
The women’s teams at +40 & +50 represented the group once again in Morocco in April against the host nation, England, and Wales. The results and performances were encouraging, with both teams having clearly improved through regular training and a solid commitment from a core group of players. The real turning point for the women’s section came from acquiring the services of Glynn Hague. He was already a dedicated women’s football coach with a solid pro academy coaching background, so we were delighted when he agreed to take on the role to lead the teams into the WNC.
Glynn and Kerry have both proved to be great additions to the group—Glynn with his coaching and Kerry, AKA Miss Spreadsheet, for her organisational skills. It’s one of my personal highlights to see nearly forty players at the Women’s trials in Pilar in 2025 competing for places. The introduction of players from Vigo, Tenerife, Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol, and Sevilla has given the teams a much more balanced look and better representation for Spanish Walking Football, in my opinion.
Where there was little pressure applied from the coaching staff on the performances of the players in a developing women’s section, the opposite could be said of the men’s teams—and particularly at +50. The team had reached the semi-final of the WNC in 2023, and it was our flagship team that we pinned realistic hopes on to take us to our first international tournament final. Competition for places was fierce, with several trials events held, including mini-tournaments in which the squad were successful, and the group looked to be gelling well.
The +60s were a new group of players who had never played as a team and, in truth, were two years behind the +50s in their development. Under the management of Bryan Richmond and the very experienced ex-Brighton full-back, John Crumplin, they set about forming a squad that would be organised and hard to beat—which turned out to be a very sensible approach.
Most of the final squads were selected at the start of the summer holidays; the +60 men were afforded a little more time to allow a few more players to stake a claim. We have received terrific support from JOMA & MAIO EMPRESA DEPORTIVA, who supplied all the kit for the squads as part of our four-year collaboration with them. So when that was handed out and the teams began to assemble for the photographs, it was a proud moment for all concerned.
The work for the tournament itself started immediately after we were notified of our successful bid in July 2024, and our relatively small but determined and dedicated team worked tirelessly for fourteen months to ensure that the global event would be a resounding success. I would like to place on record my sincere thanks to my co-tournament and Team Spain director, Mark Kavanagh, for his unwavering commitment to the project and for securing some excellent long-term sponsorship deals and key partnerships.
Key members of our team include Kerry Hague and Sharon Kavanagh, who took on many roles leading up to and during the tournament. Rui Spinola, who we flew in from Brisbane as tournament manager, as we wanted the best man for the job. Robbie Burns was also a key figure within the group, providing the conduit between Team Spain and the local authorities and service providers. Gary Stevens turns all our madcap ideas into something presentable and tangible, and it’s his work you see on the website and social media pages. I’d also like to thank Chris Burt for his amazing WNC official song, help with VEO and his media coverage. We had two young helpers providing support to Gary Stevens, over the two weeks we streamed 82 live matches on YouTube using our two VEO cameras, thanks Harvey Forster and on week two Archie Lees.
I would like to thank Javier and Diana at Sports City, Gitte and Oscar at the Town Hall in Torrevieja—all of whom we owe a debt of gratitude, and without them we could not have delivered the event. We look forward to hosting more events at Torrevieja Sports City and further collaborations with them all.
Three of our four representative teams competing at the FIWFA World Nations Cup reached the semi-finals of their respective competitions. For a nation that has a tiny fraction of the participation levels that are currently playing in the UK, this represents success in my opinion. For our +50 team, a 3rd/4th play-off win represented improvement from 2023, and each and every one of the players should cherish the medal they earned. There is always going to be disappointment in losing a semi-final—that is a natural emotion—but they had a hard route to that stage, and the match against the Czech Republic was not only the match of the competition but the match of the whole event in my opinion, and had left them exhausted.
The achievements of the Women’s +40 and Men’s +60 were exceptional. The ambition for both sides was to reach the knock-out stages, but they both surpassed that target—and then some. The men’s performance against Jersey in the QF was as convincing as it gets, and then to run England so close in the SF was again very impressive. Stuart Langworthy, the England Manager, commented that it was the hardest game they had played in several years.
The Women +40 team also tasted defeat to England in another narrow loss by a single goal to nil. An abiding memory will be watching them waste time for the final minutes of the game against our team. The players were frustrated, and the manager too, but I had a wry smile on my face thinking back on how far the team had come in just over 18 months—from just 8 players that went to Morocco in March 2024 to forcing the best team in the world to play the ball back to the keeper for the last three minutes of a World Nations Cup semi-final!!
The +50 Women’s team were competitive to the end. There were some exceptionally strong teams in the tournament with lots of experience, so to go into the last game needing a result to qualify—rather than the match being a dead rubber—was another brilliant achievement in their first tournament of this magnitude.
I would like to personally thank all the players, managers, coaches, and their long-suffering partners for their dedication in 2025, for the personal sacrifices to travel to events, for the expenses they have incurred, and for their efforts on the pitch in our colours. It’s truly appreciated, and we hope you enjoyed the experiences.
I would like to thank all our sponsors and key partners—they are on the website, so if you are in a position to patronise them, please do so. We all need banks, sports kit, insurance policies, currency accounts, etc., and they are all on there, so call them and mention Team Spain. JOMA & MAIO continue to offer 20% off all kit to clubs who have their details on our contact map.
Talking of websites, ours reached nearly 50,000 hits in October alone; our YouTube channel is flying, and so is our social media following. These are big numbers for a platform only introduced in February, and we are already the world’s most comprehensive web resource for Walking Football.
2026 – So What Next?
We will be pressing forward on all fronts!!
The new year promises to be another exciting one, with plenty of opportunities to play this great footballing format, with tournaments planned for here and abroad.
We will be applying to host the FIWFA Euros in late autumn (November, to be exact). There is no guarantee we will achieve this, but we will know later this month if our bid has been successful. The tournament will be held in Torrevieja Sports City if selected to host.
There is an addition to the Men’s +60 management team, with Scott Cousins coming in as coach and John Crumplin moving into the manager’s role after Bryan Richmond’s departure. We thank Bryan for all his efforts over the last year and the team’s 2025 tournament success. Mark Kavanagh continues with the +50 team alongside Stephen Vaughan as coach and assistant Robbie Burns. Glynn Hague heads up the ladies’ section as head coach, assisted by myself when available.
We will be introducing two new teams this year—Women’s +60 and Men’s +70. This will give us representation in all categories. It also represents great growth within our group and facilitates more opportunities to play international walking football for more people across the country.
We welcome new members to our group structure—key members that will enable us to be more professional:
Patricia Sosa
Patricia played international handball with Diana Box, the sports minister at Torrevieja Sports City, and has just retired from a career in teaching and coaching sports. She is also a key player in our +50 team and is regularly amongst the goals. Patricia joins us to be the first point of contact for Spanish players looking to get involved and trial for our representative teams. She will also scout and recommend players from the Sevilla area. This is an important role and will help us be more accessible to Spanish-born players.
Elaine Hanan
Elaine had a long and successful career in sports events management and travel logistics. She was formerly on the board of one of the largest international sports and travel companies. Her role will be to assist the managers in securing the best deals and sourcing the most cost-effective airline routes and hotel accommodation when travelling to overseas tournaments.
Lisa Graham
Lisa has a career in marketing to draw experience from and will help with specific targeted projects to grow the group and to initiate engagement with regional football associations, the RFEF, and government departments. Lisa will also help us market our competitions and secure the participation levels we are looking for.
We have received a number of invitations to events, not only in Europe but around the world. If I ever win the EuroMillions, I promise to pay for everyone to participate in them all!! We have invitations to Cape Town, Rio, Brisbane, and Japan that are long-haul, and a number of others a bit closer to home. Unfortunately, we are self-funded, and we have to look at the financial implications on the players before we accept them, but fortunately we live in a desirable part of the continent, and a lot of nations want to come to us, so it’s not all bad.
We have a few dates pencilled in for one-day events for the ladies’ group and Men’s +60 between now and April. I know John & Kav are keen to announce a training camp over the next few weeks, so watch this space. We are going to our first international competition this year in France in May, and many of you will have already been notified of this. We have another international event in Wales in August—this is not a federation event but an independently run tournament with many good-quality national teams, including some we have never played before, such as Poland, Norway, and others. The initial enquiries are that this tournament could be quite expensive in regard to airline costs, so we will have to find this out and see who is available to play, and then decide what teams we travel with and if it is with a mixed age-group squad. We are looking to travel with at least one men’s and one women’s team.
In September, we host a club tournament in Torrevieja at 7-a-side and 6-a-side with three-touch and unlimited-touch formats. This is an international club tournament with some of the best teams around already committed to the event—details of the event are on the front page of the website at www.spainwalkingfootball.com.
The FIWFA Euros will be either held at Torrevieja or somewhere else in Europe!! If we host it, it will be in early November; if it’s somewhere else, it could be October. We will participate in this with all six representative teams.
All that’s left to say is to wish you all a very happy and successful new year, and hopefully we can lift some silverware in 2026.
Mark Coleman
FOUNDER