Ceuta, football and the politics of indirect signaling

Something unusual has been happening around Ceuta.

On 18 September, Spain's national football coach Luis de la Fuente announced the first squad since Spain's 2026 World Cup victory from Ceuta. Standing at the Royal Walls with the World Cup trophy in his hands, he declared: “Esto es España, esto es Ceuta.” The Spanish Football Federation described the scene explicitly as a demonstration of Spanish football's support for the city.

Taken alone, it could be dismissed as a gesture of national solidarity after the extraordinary migration crisis that struck Ceuta on 30 and 31 July.

Taken together with what happened during the preceding two weeks, however, it forms part of a much larger pattern.

The World Cup trophy had already been taken to Ceuta on 4 September by RFEF president Rafael Louzán and De la Fuente. Louzán said that Spain had united around the national team and that now "we are with Ceuta." On 12 September, the RFEF and Spain's regional football federations issued a formal manifesto supporting the city. Separately, the business-led campaign "Todos somos caballas" moved into LaLiga stadiums, where Villarreal, Betis, Elche and Real Madrid participated. Barcelona declined to join the initiative. At Real Madrid, Kylian Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior and Ibrahima Konaté chose not to display the slogan in the same way as their teammates, and the club defended their freedom to decide individually.

At almost exactly the same time, Ceuta's political leadership was lobbying Brussels, the European Parliament was debating the security of the city, and Spanish opposition parties were describing the July events in increasingly explicit terms as a Moroccan or hybrid attack.

Yet Spain's central government was saying something significantly different.

That contradiction is the key to understanding what is happening.

The July crisis did not begin with evidence of a Moroccan operation

The immediate context was a Spanish Supreme Court judgment issued on 29 June and made public on 8 July.

The judgment did not create an open border.

It ruled that Spain's special procedure for immediate "rejection at the border" could not be applied to people intercepted at sea while swimming toward Ceuta or Melilla because they had not crossed the physical border-control structures contemplated by that provision. Such people could still be returned, but through the ordinary legal procedure for devolución, with the procedural guarantees that entails.

Online, that legal distinction was radically simplified.

Maldita.es examined more than 1,100 Arabic-language Facebook posts mentioning Ceuta and the judgment between 8 and 31 July. On 30 July, it identified 215 posts carrying essentially the same claim: that migrants arriving by swimming would no longer be immediately expelled. Some accounts repeated the message many times within minutes.

Other Facebook and WhatsApp groups were openly organising attempts to reach Ceuta in the days immediately before the crossing. Maldita documented mobilisation in Facebook groups by 26 July and links to WhatsApp groups specifically created to organise attempts to cross.

The result on 30 and 31 July was an unprecedented mass movement across the border involving tens of thousands of people.

The crucial question immediately became: who organised it?

So far, the public evidence does not establish that the Moroccan state did.

Madrid's official position is unusually clear

Pedro Sánchez told Spain's Congress on 3 September that no Spanish or foreign institution had provided his government with solid evidence that Morocco had planned or executed the event.

He described the crisis as complex and multicausal, rather than a simple operation in which a single actor triggered a predetermined result. He identified the distorted interpretation of the Supreme Court judgment, social-media propagation, migrant networks and commercial actors offering services for the crossing among the contributing factors.

The European Parliament's own research service reached a similar conclusion.

Its September briefing reports that Spain's Civil Guard investigated large Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram networks but had been unable to identify those responsible for promoting the campaign. According to the briefing, investigators found no evidence connecting the mobilisation to the Moroccan government, Moroccan security services or a particular smuggling network.

Sánchez has gone further.

In a 14 September interview, he said Moroccan authorities had themselves alerted Spain about arriving migrants and that Spain and Morocco had been preparing jointly for increased pressure following the Supreme Court judgment. He described Morocco as becoming substantially more active in containing the movement after the first hours of the crisis and subsequently agreeing to accept returns. He also stressed that Spain requires a constructive relationship with Morocco precisely because migration control and returns depend partly on Moroccan cooperation.

The European Commission has maintained the same basic approach, publicly welcoming close Spanish-Moroccan cooperation in managing the aftermath and returning people without a right to remain.

This matters because the widespread description of the July events as a proven Moroccan operation goes further than the evidence currently acknowledged by Spain's government, its security services and EU researchers.

Foreign information operations existed, but attribution is again complicated

The information environment surrounding Ceuta became international almost immediately.

Maldita found that pro-Russian and pro-Israeli networks exploited the crisis afterward. Russian-linked propaganda circulated narratives depicting the episode as a Moroccan "Green March" against Spain, while some pro-Israeli accounts promoted the opposite narrative, describing Ceuta and Melilla as Spanish colonies and amplifying "#FreeCeuta."

But Maldita's investigation makes an important distinction.

It found no evidence that these foreign information networks caused the mobilisation that preceded 30 July. Their activity was much clearer after the mass crossing, when they exploited an event already underway for their own political narratives.

Claims of Algerian state orchestration are even less established publicly.

What the evidence shows is an information environment involving genuine grievances, migrant networks, misinterpretation of Spanish law, algorithmic amplification, political opportunism and later intervention by foreign information ecosystems. That is considerably messier than a conventional state operation.

Yet another Spanish narrative developed in parallel

Although the central government has refused to attribute the event to Morocco without evidence, important Spanish political actors have done exactly that.

Ceuta's regional president Juan Jesús Vivas, a member of the Partido Popular, went to Brussels arguing that the mass crossing had been possible through Moroccan "participation or consent." He urged European institutions to treat pressure on Ceuta as pressure on a European frontier.

Vox went further. After the government declassified security documents, its parliamentary spokesperson described Morocco as the "invader" and characterised the events as an act of hybrid warfare.

The European Parliament then adopted a resolution on 17 September condemning the mass crossings and describing the instrumentalisation of irregular migration as a tool of hybrid warfare against the territorial integrity of a member state.

Significantly, the Parliament's language identifies the security phenomenon without establishing that Morocco organised the July event. The same European institutions continue simultaneously to call for cooperation with Morocco.

This produces a striking two-level discourse.

The official evidentiary position is:

There is currently no solid evidence that Morocco organised the July crossing.

The wider political-security message is:

Ceuta is Spanish and European territory, its borders are under pressure, and Europe must demonstrate that pressure on Ceuta will produce a collective response.

Both statements can coexist.

The second does not require proving the first.

This is where football becomes strategically interesting

The RFEF's actions should not automatically be described as a government-directed operation. There is currently no public evidence that Moncloa ordered the federation, Real Madrid, LaLiga or private business organisations to participate in a centrally coordinated sovereignty campaign.

Indeed, several details caution against that conclusion.

"Todos somos caballas" originated with the Asociación Valenciana de Empresarios rather than the Spanish government. Barcelona declined to participate. Several Real Madrid players exercised their individual choice not to display the message fully. Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez said his own September visit to Ceuta had been arranged with Vivas weeks beforehand rather than organised in response to the latest controversy.

Nevertheless, the cumulative effect is unmistakable.

The Ceuta government, business associations, football clubs, the RFEF, the Spanish national team and European political institutions are all communicating variants of the same proposition:

Ceuta belongs inside Spain's normal national and European political space.

Football is especially powerful for communicating this because it does something formal diplomacy cannot do as easily.

If Spain's foreign minister publicly warns Morocco that "Ceuta is Spain," it becomes an interstate diplomatic message and invites a Moroccan response.

If the Spanish military stages a major sovereignty demonstration in Ceuta, the gesture carries an even greater escalation risk.

But when the newly crowned world champions take the World Cup trophy to Ceuta, surround it with local children and footballers, and announce the national squad from the city under the words "This is Spain, this is Ceuta," the territorial message reaches millions of people without becoming a formal diplomatic ultimatum.

That is soft power in a very literal sense.

It transforms a disputed geopolitical question into imagery of ordinary national belonging.

Does reliance on symbolic power reveal weakness?

The answer depends on what kind of power is being measured.

Spain is not a militarily isolated state. It belongs to NATO and the European Union and possesses substantial conventional military and diplomatic capabilities.

But none of those facts automatically solves the problem Spain faced on 30 July.

A movement of tens of thousands of civilians driven partly through social networks, misinformation and expectations about migration law is not a conventional armed attack.

NATO itself states that Article 5 applies to an "armed attack." Significant hybrid attacks may, depending on their seriousness, eventually qualify, but that assessment is made case by case. NATO doctrine also explicitly states that the primary responsibility for dealing with a hybrid threat rests with the targeted state.

Ceuta creates an additional complication.

When NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was directly asked in 2022 whether Ceuta and Melilla were covered by NATO collective defence, he pointed to Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which defines the treaty's geographical scope, and then stressed that invoking Article 5 would ultimately require a political decision by consensus among NATO allies based on the circumstances of the particular case.

That does not mean NATO would necessarily abandon Spain if Ceuta suffered an armed attack.

It does mean there is no simple automatic mechanism by which a politically ambiguous, non-military, unattributed migration crisis instantly becomes a NATO collective-defence operation.

That distinction is fundamental.

Spain can enjoy strong conventional deterrence while remaining vulnerable to coercion, disruption or instability below the threshold at which conventional deterrence becomes useful.

The more concrete weakness was inside Spain's own crisis-management system

An analysis by security researcher Félix Arteaga of the Real Instituto Elcano, reported on 18 September, identified what it called a "functional failure" in Spain's National Security System before the July crisis.

According to the analysis, the principal problem was not the complete absence of information.

Police, Guardia Civil, the CNI and other institutions had indicators showing increased migration pressure. The weakness was the apparent inability to transform fragmented information into a cross-government strategic assessment capable of activating the national-security system and political decision-making before the crisis materialised.

Spain did not formally classify the situation as a matter of interest to national security until 25 August, almost four weeks after the mass crossing.

Sánchez himself has acknowledged that Spain must improve its ability to anticipate this kind of hybrid crisis and detect large-scale mobilisation in the digital environment.

That is a more tangible vulnerability than football symbolism.

The July crisis exposed problems of digital intelligence, strategic warning, inter-agency coordination, migration infrastructure and the capacity to respond quickly to enormous civilian movements.

None of these problems is solved by membership in NATO.

Spain also depends on the state it is implicitly signalling against

There is another structural constraint.

Spain cannot manage the Ceuta border entirely from the Spanish side.

Moroccan authorities control the territory immediately surrounding Ceuta. Cooperation is therefore required for prevention, border policing, organised-crime investigations and the readmission of people returned from Spain.

Sánchez has stated this dependency unusually openly. His argument is essentially pragmatic: Spain cannot simultaneously depend on Morocco to manage migration and returns while breaking relations with Rabat on the basis of an accusation that Spanish intelligence has not substantiated.

The European Commission follows the same logic, combining support for Spain with continued calls for sustained cooperation with Morocco.

Madrid and Rabat are also bound together through broader economic and institutional projects.

Most visibly, Spain, Morocco and Portugal will jointly host the 2030 FIFA World Cup.

That produces an unusual relationship in which Spain and Morocco can simultaneously cooperate, compete and distrust one another depending on the issue.

This is precisely the environment in which indirect signaling becomes useful.

Europeanising Ceuta changes the balance

Spain's most consequential response may therefore not be the football campaign at all.

It is the attempt to move Ceuta from a primarily Spanish-Moroccan question into a European security framework.

The European Commission has already approved €114.7 million in emergency assistance to Spain and mobilised support from Frontex, Europol and the EU Asylum Agency.

The European Parliament's September resolution frames Ceuta as an external EU border and calls for stronger European border protection.

This has an obvious strategic effect.

In a purely bilateral dispute, Morocco faces Spain.

When Ceuta is treated as an external frontier of the European Union, the relevant political arena becomes much larger.

That does not settle the historical Moroccan-Spanish disagreement over Ceuta's sovereignty. It does, however, increase the number of institutions with an interest in the city's security and stability.

Football performs a similar function in the cultural sphere.

The legal and political message is:

Ceuta is European.

The football message is:

Ceuta is ordinary Spain.

They operate through different institutions but reinforce the same underlying territorial narrative.

This should not be confused with proof of coordination

It would be tempting to connect every event into a single centrally managed Spanish influence operation.

The available evidence does not justify that conclusion.

The RFEF has its own leadership. LaLiga clubs made different decisions. The "Todos somos caballas" initiative came from private business figures. Barcelona opted out. Individual Real Madrid players resisted the symbolism. Ceuta's regional government is controlled by the PP and is openly fighting with Sánchez's national government over responsibility for the crisis.

These are not the characteristics of a perfectly controlled state communications campaign.

A better description is distributed strategic convergence.

Different Spanish institutions have different motives, but after the July shock many have independently found value in strengthening the same idea: Ceuta must not be perceived as geographically peripheral, politically negotiable or strategically isolated.

That creates a national message without requiring a single command centre.

What the episode actually says about Spanish power

Calling this simply "fear of Morocco" goes beyond what can be demonstrated.

But the opposite conclusion, that Spain's NATO and EU memberships eliminate meaningful vulnerability, is equally difficult to sustain.

The episode exposes a specific form of strategic constraint.

Spain enjoys powerful conventional alliances but confronts a problem that conventional alliances are poorly designed to resolve.

It possesses military deterrence but depends on Moroccan cooperation for migration control.

Its government does not have sufficient evidence to formally accuse Rabat of organising the July event, while influential domestic actors continue to regard Morocco as the obvious strategic threat behind Ceuta's insecurity.

Madrid therefore has incentives to keep official diplomacy restrained while allowing, tolerating or simply benefiting from much more forceful messages generated elsewhere in Spanish society.

Football fits that environment exceptionally well.

It can communicate sovereignty without issuing a diplomatic note.

It can display national unity without deploying soldiers.

It can make Ceuta visible to millions without opening sovereignty negotiations.

And because football organisations and clubs are institutionally separate from the foreign ministry, the state does not have to formally own every message that emerges.

That is not necessarily evidence of weakness in the conventional sense.

It is evidence of the limits of conventional power.

The deeper lesson from Ceuta

The July crisis illustrates an increasingly important security problem for European states.

A country can possess fighter aircraft, NATO guarantees, sophisticated intelligence services and strong international alliances while remaining vulnerable to a mixture of social-media mobilisation, misinformation, migration pressure, legal ambiguity and administrative overload.

These instruments operate in the space between ordinary politics and armed conflict.

Attribution is difficult.

Military retaliation is often inappropriate.

Alliance commitments become ambiguous.

And the government under pressure must continue cooperating with actors it may also distrust.

In such an environment, symbolic politics becomes part of deterrence.

The European Parliament resolution, the appeal to Frontex, Vivas's lobbying in Brussels, the RFEF manifesto, the World Cup trophy in Ceuta, Real Madrid's involvement and the national-team announcement should therefore not automatically be treated as evidence of one centrally organised campaign.

But neither should they be treated as unrelated gestures.

Together they reveal the political objective that has emerged after July:

to reduce Ceuta's strategic isolation by embedding it more deeply in Spanish national identity and European political solidarity, while avoiding an official confrontation with Morocco that the available evidence does not currently justify and that Spain's practical dependence on Moroccan cooperation makes costly.

That is the paradox at the centre of Spain's Ceuta policy.

The country is powerful enough that a conventional attack on its territory would carry enormous consequences.

Yet the crisis demonstrated that pressure need not take the form of a conventional attack.

And it is precisely in that space, below the threshold of war, below clear attribution and below automatic NATO intervention, that football, media narratives, European institutions and national symbolism suddenly become instruments of statecraft.