Photographs of Ferrán Torres and Marcos Llorente embracing and kissing after Spain’s 2026 World Cup triumph have provoked a wave of homophobic ridicule that columnist María José Navarro describes as the most absurd hangover from any World Cup celebration she can recall.
Navarro says she had believed Spain had moved beyond such attitudes, but concedes that men quick to reach for an anti-gay joke at the expense of two young players still exist. She notes that Llorente has the personality to answer his critics, saying that there is nothing more masculine than a man who is confident in himself.
The piece then turns to Torres, noting that the scorer of Spain’s 2026 World Cup-winning goal shares something with Andrés Iniesta, who scored the goal that gave Spain the 2010 title: both men have lived through depression. Torres’s disclosure of that experience, Navarro writes, has drawn mockery from those who read vulnerability as weakness.
Navarro argues that men who show affection or admit to insecurity continue to be turned into targets by those who, she suggests, are themselves unsettled by sincerity. Until those attitudes change, she writes, genuine progress in Spain will be very hard to achieve.
