Dani Garrido has put names to Spain’s World Cup plan, and the clearest reading is that Unai Simón and Aymeric Laporte are expected to start, while Nico Williams should also be in the first-choice conversation if his body allows it. In the same forecast, Iñaki Williams was marked out for minutes with Ghana, giving Athletic four players across the tournament and turning the club’s presence into something rare at this level.
The timing matters because the 2026 World Cup opens in Mexico, Canada and the United States, and Athletic have not had four players represented at the same World Cup since 1950. That alone explains why Garrido’s remarks have landed now: they are not abstract talk about a future squad, but a direct public projection of how players from one club may shape two national teams when the biggest tournament begins.
Garrido was firm about Simón. He said Luis de la Fuente would not even think about replacing him, “not even on a day with fever,” and described the goalkeeper as a pillar of Spain, a heavy presence in the dressing room and someone around whom there is no debate. That is as close as punditry gets to locking a place down before the first whistle. He said the same of Laporte, calling him the central defender with the greatest hierarchy in the squad and predicting that he would start alongside Cubarsí.
There is a reason those judgments carry weight. Simón and Nico Williams are heading to their second World Cup as Athletic players, while Laporte will be there for the first time as an Athletic player after going to the 2022 World Cup with Manchester City. Garrido tied Laporte’s standing to Spain’s recent success too, saying he had answered doubts during the Eurocopa and formed an important part of the side with Le Normand.
Nico Williams is the more complicated case. Garrido said the winger’s season has been heavily affected by pubalgia, one of the most stubborn problems in football, but he still expects a different picture if the player is well by the time the World Cup starts. He said Nico has looked much better in recent matches and that, because Luis de la Fuente likes to stretch the field, the winger could be a starter when fit. That is the friction in the forecast: a player whose year has been disrupted is still being spoken about as a starter because his ceiling remains too high to ignore.
For Ghana, the forecast was shorter but no less pointed. Garrido said Iñaki Williams will bring experience and get minutes, even as the team enters the tournament without Mohammed Kudus. He also highlighted Semenyo as a possible one of the best attackers of the World Cup and noted that Ghana has changed coaches recently, with Queiroz now in charge. But the immediate significance for Athletic is simpler than the broader tournament picture: for the first time in generations, four of its players are on the World Cup stage, and the biggest question now is whether Nico Williams arrives in time to turn Garrido’s projection into a starting role rather than a hopeful guess.
