Major honours
The Spanish Badminton Federation is a late arrival, founded only in 1985, and this program's achievements have come almost entirely from one player and one coach. Huelva-born Carolina Marin moved to Madrid's High Performance Centre (CAR) at fourteen to train under coach Fernando Rivas, and won the World Championship three times — Copenhagen 2014, Jakarta 2015 and Nanjing 2018 — the only player of either sex to win three world singles titles. At Rio 2016 she beat P.V. Sindhu to become the first European woman to win Olympic badminton gold, and she has won the European Championship seven times. These three World Championship golds and one Olympic gold make up the whole of Spain's badminton record. Marin tore her ACL twice, in 2019 and again in the Paris 2024 Olympic semifinal, the latter while she was ahead in the match.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
Marin and P.V. Sindhu met in successive finals at the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2018 Nanjing World Championships, creating an unlikely Spain-India rivalry, while within Europe Spain competed with long-time sole power Denmark for control of the women's game.