Spain clinched automatic qualification to the 2026 World Cup despite drawing with Turkey in Seville.<\/p>\n
Luis de la Fuente’s side finish the campaign top of Group E, having won and kept a clean sheet in five of their six qualifying matches.<\/p>\n
La Roja looked likely to maintain that flawless record when, after just four minutes, Dani Olmo squeezed the ball home from Marc Cucurella’s cut-back to score his 12th international goal on his first start since March.<\/p>\n
But they conceded a first goal of their campaign when Deniz Gul guided the ball past Unai Simon to equalise three minutes before the break.<\/p>\n
Turkey then went ahead on 54 minutes, Salih Ozcan powering a neat effort into the bottom left corner to leave Spain’s 30-match unbeaten run in competitive internationals under threat.<\/p>\n
But in-form forward Mikel Oyarzabal restored parity eight minutes later with his sixth goal of qualifying, prodding home the rebound after Yeremy Pino’s effort was cleared off the line. <\/p>\n
Second-placed Turkey needed to win by a seven-goal margin to deny Spain top spot and, while they showed tremendous spirit and fight, they could not overcome the European champions and had to settle for a play-off spot.<\/p>\n
Barcelona forward Olmo had chances to double his side’s lead in the first half but was denied by two good saves from Manchester United goalkeeper Altay Bayindir.<\/p>\n
Baris Yilmaz’s acrobatic overhead kick also forced a superb save from Simon with the game finely poised at 1-1.<\/p>\n
The result means only England will end the European World Cup qualifiers having not conceded a goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spain clinched automatic qualification to the 2026 World Cup despite drawing with Turkey in Seville. Luis de la…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-147237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}