Fabian Ruiz Has Not Lost a Single Match for Spain in Seven Years, and Is Now Six Games From a 57-Match Unbeaten Record

• Fabian Ruiz has not lost a single match for Spain in 51 appearances stretching back to his international debut in 2019, a personal unbeaten run that is now six matches from equaling Carlos Marchena’s Spain record of 57 without defeat.
• Spain’s 3-2 comeback win at Wembley over England stretched the national team’s own unbeaten run to 39 consecutive matches, already longer than the previous European record of 37 held by Italy and well past Argentina’s 36-match run that ended at the 2022 World Cup.
• Ruiz has won the Nations League, the European Championship, the World Cup, and the Champions League with Paris Saint-Germain across the span of his personal streak, and was named on this year’s Ballon d’Or shortlist.

The Spain Midfielder Six Wins From Football History

Fabian Ruiz has been on a football field for Spain 51 times, a run stretching all the way back to his debut in 2019. He has never once been on the losing side. That is not a typo or a stretch of good fortune across a handful of friendlies. It covers a World Cup win, a European Championship win, a Nations League title, and now a Champions League medal with Paris Saint-Germain, all completed inside a run that shows no sign of ending. After Spain’s 3-2 comeback win over England at Wembley on September 26, Ruiz sits six matches away from Carlos Marchena’s all-time Spain record of 57 matches without a loss.

It is the kind of number that sounds like it must be exaggerated somewhere along the way. It is not. Ruiz has simply been present, week after week and tournament after tournament, for the best sustained period in the history of the Spanish national team, and he has barely been mentioned as the reason why.

A Team Streak and a Personal One, Running Side by Side

Spain’s win over England extended two separate but related streaks. As a team, Spain have now gone 39 consecutive matches without defeat, a run built on 30 wins and 9 draws following their last loss, a 1-0 friendly defeat to Colombia. That figure has already passed Italy’s European record of 37 consecutive unbeaten matches, set between 2018 and 2021, and moved well beyond the 36-match run Argentina put together between 2019 and 2022 before Saudi Arabia beat them in the opening match of the World Cup in Qatar.

Both of those comparisons matter for how they ended, not just how long they lasted. Italy’s run, one of the most admired defensive spells in the sport, collapsed against North Macedonia in a World Cup qualifying play-off semi-final that kept the reigning European champions out of the 2022 World Cup entirely. Argentina’s run ended in the most public way possible, a defeat to a team ranked more than 40 places below them on the opening day of the tournament they went on to win. Long unbeaten runs in international football do not tend to fade out quietly. They usually end in exactly the match a team can least afford to lose. Spain’s current streak has already outlasted both of those cautionary tales, and Ruiz’s personal run inside it has now outlasted even the players who were on the pitch for Spain’s own solitary defeat across this same stretch.

Ruiz’s own streak is longer still: it survived a match the team as a whole did not. He missed Spain’s 1-0 loss to Colombia, the result that ended up defining the start line for the team’s current run. Everyone else on the pitch that day has lost the right to say they have never tasted defeat in a Spain shirt across this period. Ruiz, absent through no design of his own, still can.

What He Has Actually Won Along the Way

Fifty-one games unbeaten would be a notable streak for a squad player picking up occasional caps. For Ruiz, it has happened while collecting almost every trophy the sport has to offer. Across the span of this run he has won the UEFA Nations League with Spain in 2023, the European Championship in 2024, the World Cup this year, and the Champions League with Paris Saint-Germain. He was also named on this year’s Ballon d’Or shortlist, recognition of a season and a body of work that has made him one of the most complete midfielders in the world game without ever quite becoming the player most casual fans would name first when asked to list Spain’s stars.

That is part of what makes the streak worth pointing out now, rather than waiting for it to become a record outright. Ruiz plays in a Spain midfield that has, at various points over the past three years, included Rodri, Pedri, and Gavi, all names that tend to draw the headlines when this team is discussed. Ruiz has quietly been the constant across the trophies each of them has helped win, present for every one of them, and unbeaten throughout.

Wembley Was the Latest Test, and Spain Passed It

The England match itself was not a comfortable afternoon for Ruiz or his teammates. England led through goals from Anthony Gordon and Harry Kane before Spain turned the game around, eventually winning 3-2 at Wembley in front of a crowd that had spent most of the match believing it was heading toward an England win. That is precisely the kind of result that tends to end long unbeaten runs: a partisan away crowd and a scoreline that briefly pointed the other way. Spain needed a second-half fightback to see it through rather than simply strolling to another routine victory, which makes extending both streaks in the same match a stronger statement than doing it against weaker opposition would have been.

Ruiz played his part in a midfield built to control matches like that one, and Spain’s ability to come from behind against an England side playing in front of their own supporters says as much about the depth of this squad as any individual number does. Both streaks, the team’s 39 matches and Ruiz’s 51, extended on the same afternoon, against the same opponent, in the same stadium. Neither was ever seriously threatened by full time.

What makes that fightback relevant to Ruiz’s own number is simple. A player padding out an unbeaten run against weak opposition in dead rubbers is a common story in international football. A player extending one at Wembley, from behind, against a major rival, in a competitive fixture that both sides wanted to win, is a different kind of evidence. It is the difference between a streak that survives purely on results going a team’s way and one that survives with the team repeatedly forcing results to go its way. Ruiz’s 51 games fall firmly into the second category.

The Record That Is Still Six Games Away

Carlos Marchena’s 57-match unbeaten run for Spain, built between 2002 and 2012, has stood as the benchmark for well over a decade. Marchena was a defender who played through Spain’s golden generation, the period that produced back-to-back European Championships either side of a World Cup win, and his record has outlasted the international careers of most of the players who won those tournaments alongside him. Ruiz needs six more matches without a loss to draw level with it, and given the shape of Spain’s current squad and the position they now occupy at the top of their Nations League group following the win over England, there is little reason to expect the streak will end before he gets there.

Spain’s next matches will decide how soon Ruiz reaches Marchena’s mark. A team that has not lost in 39 matches, built around players who have barely known defeat across half a decade of major tournament football, gives him a reasonable platform to get there. Whenever it happens, the six-game countdown now sitting in front of Ruiz is a rare thing in modern football: a genuine record chase built entirely on results nobody outside the Spanish federation’s own statisticians had been tracking closely, for a player who has spent his best years being the answer to a question almost nobody had thought to ask.