David Raya vs Unai Simon: Why Spain keep overlooking their best goalkeeper three months before the World Cup

Luis de la Fuente told reporters on Friday “In England, they consider David Raya the best goalkeeper in the world, and here in Spain nobody talks about him.” He was making a point. And the point, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, is that De la Fuente is aware his own country's media isn't paying enough attention to one of the most in-form goalkeepers on the planet, and he still isn't going to start him.

Unai Simon played the full 90 minutes against Serbia instead. Raya sat on the bench, an unused substitute.

The numbers are difficult to explain away. Raya has 21 clean sheets in 40 appearances this season. Simon has seven in 38. Raya has conceded 25 goals all campaign. Simon has conceded 60.

Arsenal are nine points clear at the top of the Premier League, their goalkeeper leading the league's clean sheet chart, with club legend Thierry Henry saying that the Spaniard deserves the Player of the Season award.

Simon, meanwhile, plays for Athletic Bilbao, who sit ninth in La Liga and have conceded 41 goals in the league alone.

De la Fuente's defence rests on experience, familiarity and what Simon enables Spain to do with the ball. And it's not entirely without merit. The Athletic Bilbao goalkeeper started all six of Spain's World Cup qualifying games, kept two clean sheets and reportedly maintained a 90.1% pass accuracy across those fixtures.

Spain conceded the fourth-fewest shots per 90 in qualifying and finished the campaign without losing a game. De la Fuente argues that Simon's understanding with the centre-backs, built over years of shared training and tournament experience, allows Spain's defenders to push higher and press more aggressively. Stability, in his view, isn't just about saves. It's about the whole structure around the goalkeeper, and disrupting that structure three months before a World Cup is a risk he's not prepared to take.

That's a coherent argument for managers who have recently won something. De la Fuente won Euro 2024 with Simon between the posts, which gives him significant cover for this stance. And it's true that international football asks different things of a goalkeeper than club football.

The demands of Spain's system, playing out from the back under high press, building through the thirds, requiring a sweeper-keeper mentality as much as a shot-stopper, don't necessarily favour the goalkeeper with the best club numbers in isolation.

But Raya's performances this season aren't just good numbers on a spreadsheet. He's been making big saves that win games. That stoppage-time reflex save against Chelsea in March, caught by Sky Sports cameras and watched half a million times overnight, was the kind of instinctive, game-deciding moment that reminds you what elite goalkeeping actually looks like.

Simon, at his best, is a good goalkeeper. At his best this season, which hasn't been consistently, he's been a decent one. The gap has widened to a point where former Spain goalkeeper Santi Canizares described it this week as “a very high-profile issue” on COPE, and said De la Fuente “didn't want to create a debate about who's in better form at the end of the season.”

That suggests even people inside the Spanish football establishment know the logic is getting harder to defend.

And then there's Joan Garcia, which makes this whole situation even more unusual.

The Barcelona goalkeeper has 12 clean sheets in La Liga this season, the most of any goalkeeper in the division. He's 24 years old, playing at the highest level, performing exceptionally. He didn't even make the matchday squad against Serbia.

Barcelona fans are furious, with some openly calling De la Fuente a biased coach. The Spain manager called up four goalkeepers for this window specifically to avoid committing to a pecking order, which Canizares correctly identified as a deliberate strategy to keep the question unanswered until the last possible moment.

De la Fuente has around 11 weeks between now and the opening game of the World Cup in June. He has three goalkeepers who are currently performing at a level above the man he keeps starting. He won Euro 2024 with Simon, which buys him some political cover. But football has a way of stripping away cover when the tournaments start, and if Spain concede from a situation that a more in-form goalkeeper handles differently, the question of why Raya spent another tournament watching from the bench is going to be very uncomfortable to answer.