Spain's World Cup and European Championship-winning coach looks back at the political turmoil he has overcome and talks about feeling a responsibility to promote sport in his country

Following their friendly against Saudi Arabia on Friday, the world and double European champions Spain begin their World Cup qualifying campaign against Georgia on Tuesday. In an exclusive conversation conducted in Madrid, Jimmy Burns catches up with his friend the La Roja's coach Vicente del Bosque.

Vicente del Bosque arrives for our meeting in downtown Madrid, slightly late and looking worried, his attention distracted by the mobile phone he has an ear to. "But have you no idea where he is?" he pleads into it.

"You see, I've lost one of the boys," Del Bosque tells me as we sit down together in a quiet room of a hotel near the Santiago Bernabéu stadium where we won't be disturbed by autograph hunters. I have rarely seen him so agitated on or off the pitch. There is a touch of irony, in that the venue for our meeting is just next to the skyscraper headquarters of Bankia – its leaning towers standing like a metaphor to the shaky bank at the heart of Spain's financial crisis. Del Bosque today may be showing momentary signs of mild panic, but he is one of Spain's few remaining success stories.

It is late July, less than a month after Spain, managed by Del Bosque, have broken a football record.

They won the European Championship, the second in a row, and the third major tournament in four years for the 2010 World Cup winners. Half the Spanish capital, including discredited and humiliated politicians and bankers, has been slowly emptying as Madrileños head for their traditional summer holidays. You would have thought Del Bosque might have earned himself a break. But he has chosen to be with the "chicos" instead.

The boys in question turn out not to be the Spanish squad players who are sunning themselves in various resorts before the resumption of La Liga, but some less privileged school kids doing a state-funded summer course in a local sports centre. Del Bosque has been helping to mentor them.

He clearly feels a special responsibility for encouraging sport in his country. The summer camp has been going well except for this latest incident when one of the boys is reported missing after failing to turn up for the bus. Del Bosque is telling me the story, when the phone rings again to inform him that José, the "missing boy", had simply turned up for the wrong bus. "Thank God, he has been found safe and sound," he says, switching his phone off and accepting my offer of a cold beer. I've known him long enough to identify this as his preferred drink on a hot sultry day when he needs to relax.

It was back in 2003 that we first met. At the time I was researching a book on Real Madrid and Del Bosque had just been sacked after David Beckham's transfer. The club president, Florentino Pérez, had declared that the overweight, balding and mustachioed Del Bosque did not fit the image or the style of the galácticos – a team of high-value star signings and celebrities designed not just to win trophies but to sell merchandising and secure big sponsorship deals.

Del Bosque was not just a hugely respected veteran Real Madrid player, but also had coached the club through one of its most successful periods since the golden 1950s . While clearly hurt by the injustice of his dismissal, Del Bosque still came across as generous in his praise of Beckham. "I think that he was formed by a great club – Manchester United. He has great qualities – a team player, a great touch, good vision of play, good creative play," he told me just after Beckham had arrived at the Bernabéu.

More than 10 years on, Beckham, in top category football terms, is history, while Del Bosque is still in the business of making it. Having already achieved what no other national team manager has managed, Del Bosque is now facing the challenge of defending a world title, as Spain play in the qualifying rounds for Brazil 2014 – but he takes nothing for granted. Arrogance simply isn't in Del Bosque's DNA.

In manner and speech, Del Bosque remains one of the most modest and self-effacing gentleman in football I have ever met. No amount of titles including his ennobling as Marquis Del Bosque by King Juan Carlos has gone to his head. He still looks like a retired civil guard, remains hugely loyal to his friends and they to him, and still spends as much time as he can at home with his family, within which his second son, 22-year-old Alvaro, who has Down's syndrome, is the focus of much loving attention. "In the beginning, we cried a lot. Now, looking back, we realise what idiots we were. We love him so much," he says.

Unlike the 2010 World Cup campaign, Alvaro joined his father only belatedly in last summer's Euro championship – the only hint at the time Del Bosque may have made plans for a less successful outcome. Del Bosque makes no excuses for the nervousness he felt in the run-up to a tournament which some commentators doubted Spain could win again.

He now tells me that he himself was prepared to offer to resign if Spain were knocked out at an early stage and the Spanish Federation, media, and fans all turned against him as he expected them to.

"There were people who thought we would be lucky to get to the quarter finals, and people who thought we might even get knocked out at the group stage … we were haunted by a certain ancestral pessimism," Del Bosque recalls.

Among the internal problems Del Bosque had to deal with was the rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona which had threatened a potential source of division within the national squad. "There had been some ugly confrontations between the clubs [we all saw that] but I think there were two players in particular, Xavi Hernández and Iker Casillas who knew that the national squad was worth defending, and realised that the scenes they saw on TV did not reflect well on anyone." The scenes included José Mourinho poking Barça's Tito Vilanova in the eye.

Conflict resolution – or remedying the antagonisms fuelled by Mourinho – took the form of Del Bosque talking to both players, club captains who had been personal friends for many years, and each of them talking to colleagues who were in the national squad.

The adverse circumstances he faced included the absence of his main goal scorer David Villa and hardworking defender Carles Puyol, a seemingly out of form Fernando Torres, and signs that some of the players he'd picked for his squad, like Fernando Llorente, might be exhausted after a demanding season of domestic and club international fixtures. Psychologically, there was the fear that Spain's general political and economic crisis, with the country increasingly divided regionally, might dampen the general enthusiasm La Roja had generated in brighter times.

"I realised that the political context had got worse since the 2010 World Cup. I tried to ignore it but I wanted, as a national coach – you may call this Utopia – to make Catalans and Basques feel good about supporting a Spanish side … to unite even the most sectarian and nationalist. The thought of using football to help unite [Spaniards] is something that makes me feel happy," says Del Bosque.

There is a pragmatism here, for Del Bosque knows that the best players in Spain are Catalan and play for Barcelona, and there are Basque born Spaniards playing not just for Athletic Bilbao but for other leading Spanish clubs, including Real Madrid. But Del Bosque also has an ideological part to him which he owes to his family's experience of the Spanish Civil War when his father ended up thrown into prison for defending the cause of the democratically elected Spanish Republic.

"My father used to talk to me to convince me that nothing of what he lived through should ever be repeated," Del Bosque told me when we first met.

During this latest encounter, politics is never far from our conversation. "Football has an important role to play in society," he reflects now, "players should have a sense of social responsibility, have a moral dimension to them which shows up in good conduct … Spain used to be very individualistic in its sporting activities. Now we are showing we are pretty good in teams – that is an improvement."

While his admiration for the recently proclaimed European player of the year, Andrés Iniesta, is well known along with Casillas and Xavi, it seems as good a time as ever to probe him about some of the other players he picked for his squad and who currently form part of his World Cup campaign. I begin with Torres. "His form had improved as the season had gone on and he'd played in the final of the Champions League with Chelsea and he'd a track record as a member of the squad, more than 90 matches as an international, and he was one of the best strikers I had available," he says.

So did he get as much out of Torres as he planned: "I think he really was a help to us, and I got everything there was to have out of him. In the second match, he helped us beat Ireland, and he nearly scored against Italy, were it not for Buffon … I think he was in good physical shape. Yes, I heard the cries of 'Llorente, Llorente' from the fans. But just as I found a time to use Torres, I just could not find the opportunity to use Llorente over six matches … and I say that with regrets not because I favour one player over the other, which I don't, but because Llorente is on the personal front a really nice guy and is a great striker."

Cesc Fábregras? "He was a good solution. He is a player that moves well in a forward position, and combines well in midfield …"

Jordi Alba? "I was very confident about his abilities … One day when we were preparing for the Euros in our training camp in Austria I told Jordi, 'You are going to be the best wing-back of the tournament' … and I told him that not to encourage him, but because I really believed it. He is fast, controls the ball well, good technically, defends well – he has got it all. He reminds me of Roberto Carlos when he was at Real Madrid."

Our conversation momentarily gets back to politics as I suggest a comparison between his coaching of the Spanish squad and the management of the European economy. It is a subject on which he does not mince his words: "The economy is a disaster. No one knows anything about economics. It's the great lie of the economists. By contrast in football people might have contrasting opinions, each of which has some validity. But the economists always speak in conditionals – what a mess."

We return to the Euros – the football ones. He reflects on Spain's first game against Italy, when the two countries drew in their group stage. "It was a really uncomfortable match for us. Italy did not play as they had always seemed to play."

Mourinho told Al-Jazeera that Del Bosque had a made a mistake when not playing with a striker. "That was his opinion," Del Bosque tells me without wanting to be drawn into a public controversy with Real Madrid's polemical coach. "There is a limit in a tournament to how much energy one should waste trying to convince journalists or other commentators. The important thing is to have one's own plan and to go ahead with it, which is not to say that we do not listen."

As things turned out, Del Bosque did not stick to the same system through the tournament. As he reveals to me he did have his doubts about whether to play with a striker or a false No9, and admits that the day Spain played against Portugal, he made a mistake bringing on Alvaro Negredo, one of three strikers in the squad.

So what went through his head when that match went to penalties? "I thought this is now a question of good scoring, good goalkeeping, luck … and psychology. I began to pick the players who were really up for it. Sergio Ramos, who had come from missing a penalty in the Champions League against Bayern Munich but was really motivated – and then there was Fábregas who kept saying 'I want to take the fifth [penalty], I want to take the fifth'. The number had brought him good luck in a previous encounter with Italy, in the quarter-final shoot out at Euro 2008. He had a premonition and spoke out with such conviction that I changed my original order and put him fifth," recalls Del Bosque.

And the final against Italy? "We came to it rested, and feeling confident. It helped that the pitch was perfect – we are a team that needs good conditions to play well – and from the opening whistle we felt comfortable with the ball. We started controlling well, linking up well, and we played like we knew we could play. There was no need to change the script. We had convinced ourselves of victory."

The consolidation of La Roja's self belief, with players that play for each other – the definitive conquest of the great underachieving complex that haunted the Spanish squad for so many years – is one of Del Bosque's widely recognised achievements.

I share with him a comment a Spanish friend had made hours before our meeting. "If our government could achieve politically and economically what Del Bosque has achieved in football terms, our country would be on the way to recovery by now," my friend had noted.

However Del Bosque does not claim to hold the key to resolving Spain's problems. "It's true that our squad provokes a lot of national good will. I only wish it could play in Catalonia or in the Basque country, but the political situation doesn't allow it – I hope that things will change," he says.

I ask him is he has ever felt manipulated politically by the Spanish government in Madrid. He pauses before answering: "Look, we are football players. We represent our country and there is a positive aspect to what we do. We are a group of players that work well as a team and behave well. In that sense we can show another face of Spain, one where there is civility and co-existence and where the flag we have does not belong to one group or another but to everyone. No one has the right to monopolise it for their own interests."

For his father's and my Spanish mother's generation the word Red (Roja) was a word normally used by the victors of the Spanish Civil War in a derogatory sense, to signify a communist, which is why Spain was simply referred to as the "national squad". Only under Del Bosque has the name La Roja taken hold, as a way of branding the team colours, although diehard Francoists still grumble.

I ask Del Bosque what he thinks about now when people say La Roja?

"I think it has a good significance, a good message – it's a simple one. It means unity. We are a united team."

The updated paperback edition, including coverage of Euro 2012, of Jimmy Burns' latest book La Roja: A Journey Through Spanish Football is published this month by Simon & Schuster