Mikel Oyarzabal, the forward who disappears and then decides finals

Mikel Oyarzabal

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 21, 1997 Eibar
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	World Cup 2026 · Eurocup 2024 · Copa del Rey ×2 · U21 Euro 2019
Individual awards	La Liga Team of the Season · Olympic silver medal, men's football

Against Cape Verde, in Spain’s opening match of the World Cup, Mikel Oyarzabal played thirty minutes without touching the ball once. No player at a World Cup had done that since the tournament’s matches began to be logged in detail. Five weeks later he finished as Spain’s leading scorer in a tournament Spain won, level with the national record for goals at a single World Cup. Both facts describe the same player. Oyarzabal can vanish from a match for long stretches, and he is still the one standing over the penalty spot, or arriving unmarked at the far post, when something important is being decided.

He was not built as a centre-forward. For most of his career at Real Sociedad he drifted in from the left onto his stronger foot, a creator who happened to score. Luis de la Fuente, who coached him with Spain’s under-twenty-ones and at the Tokyo Olympics, turned him into Spain’s number nine almost by subtraction: no one else in the squad attacked the space between centre-backs with the same timing, and no one else asked so little of the ball before the moment that mattered.

The path started in Eibar, the Gipuzkoan industrial town where he was born on 21 April 1997. Real Sociedad brought him into its academy at Zubieta at fourteen, he made his debut for the reserve team in November 2014 and, eleven months later, replaced Carlos Vela for his first La Liga minutes in a 4-0 win at Levante. By May 2016, at nineteen and before he had played a full top-flight season, he had his first senior cap for Spain, coming on for Nolito in a friendly against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Alongside all of it he completed a degree in business administration at the University of Deusto, which tells you something about the temperament.

At Real Sociedad he inherited the number 10 from Xabi Prieto, and with it the role of local boy who stays. The cup final against Athletic Club, the Basque derby postponed by the pandemic and played behind closed doors in Seville in April 2021, was decided by one kick: his penalty, the only goal of the night, gave the club its first major trophy since 1987. The same summer he scored the decisive penalty in Spain’s quarter-final shootout against Switzerland at the European Championship and then the goal in the Tokyo Olympic final, which Spain lost 2-1 to Brazil.

The knee nearly took the arc away. In March 2022 he ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament of his left knee in training, missed the rest of that season and the World Cup in Qatar, and did not play again until the last day of the year. In February 2023 he signed a contract through 2028, and that June he was named club captain.

His second life with Spain began on the bench. At Euro 2024 he started once in seven matches, a substitute behind Álvaro Morata. In the final in Berlin he came on, waited, and in the 86th minute met Marc Cucurella’s cross to beat England 2-1.

There is a fair case against him, and it is not about loyalty. A large share of his defining goals have come from twelve yards or from the last ten minutes, and for long spells he offers little of what a conventional striker is judged on: he rarely dribbles past anyone and he is no target man. The Cape Verde number was not an accident. And in the biggest match of his career, the World Cup final against Argentina at MetLife Stadium, he started, created little, and was replaced after 62 minutes by Ferran Torres, who scored the only goal in extra time. The man who settles finals was watching from the bench when Spain won the one that counts most.

What the case misses is what he does before the ball reaches him. Oyarzabal’s work is in the run that drags a defender out of the lane Lamine Yamal wants, and in the composure that makes de la Fuente hand him penalties ahead of more famous names. In the semi-final against France, Yamal won a penalty after Lucas Digne brought him down; Oyarzabal took it and put Spain ahead in a 2-0 win. That goal, his fifth of the tournament, after braces against Saudi Arabia and Austria, matched Emilio Butragueño and David Villa for the most by a Spaniard at one World Cup and moved him past Fernando Hierro into sixth on Spain’s all-time scoring list.

The season that led there was his best at club level: a career-high 15 La Liga goals in 2025-26, his hundredth top-division goal in May, a place in the league’s team of the season, and another cup. In the Copa del Rey final against Atlético Madrid, again in Seville, he scored a penalty in first-half stoppage time; Real Sociedad drew 2-2 and won the shootout 4-3. He had also scored his kick in the Nations League final shootout that Spain lost to Portugal the previous June.

After the World Cup final, he explained the title in the plainest terms. “Many of us players have been together for 10, 12 years, sometimes with the coach too,” he said. “That helps a lot in a tournament as long as this one.” He has been with his partner, Ainhoa Larrauri, since 2015; they became parents to a son in December 2023.

The new season started slowly. Through his first seven league matches of 2026-27 he had two assists and no goals, with Real Sociedad also back in the Europa League. Then, on 26 September at Wembley, in Spain’s first match since the final, he chipped the ball over the goalkeeper in the 74th minute to beat England 3-2 in the Nations League. It was the same opponent he had beaten in Berlin. At 29, with Spain’s next major tournament two years away and his club contract running to 2028, Oyarzabal’s position is settled. What has never been settled is how much of the game he needs to touch to decide it.

Tags: sports, athletes, 2026 FIFA World Cup, footballers, Lamine Yamal, Mikel Oyarzabal, Spain national football team, UEFA Euro 2024, Real Sociedad