Spain's Fernando Torres, right, is challenged by Saudi Arabia's Osama Hawsawi during a friendly match in Pontevedra, northwestern Spain, in September. Associated Press

Wednesday night marked the final round of international exhibition games of 2012, and all over Europe, the top soccer teams finished the year with big-ticket matchups.

In Amsterdam, the Netherlands renewed its bitter rivalry with Germany. In Stockholm, England faced Sweden, a side it has met at two of the last three World Cups and narrowly beat at Euro 2012. And in Parma, Italy offered a less than neighborly welcome for France.

Meanwhile, halfway across the globe, the stiff test that Spain selected for itself was... Panama.

Indeed, the defending world and European champions chose to cap a year that saw them anointed the most dominant national team of all time by traveling to a country with a population only slightly larger than Madrid's.

"I really wonder how many times in history you've had the world champion going to play in Panama," said Juanma Lillo, a former manager in Spain's La Liga.

But using international exhibition games to pick on minnows is nothing new for Spain, which has topped the FIFA rankings for much of the past three years.

Since the beginning of 2011, the average world ranking of its opponents has been 49.6. And that's a run that included games against England and Italy, both in the top 10 in 2011, to bring up the average. This year, La Roja's highest-ranked opponent was South Korea (No. 31 at the time). Other on-paper mismatches included a trip to Puerto Rico (then 138th in the world), Saudi Arabia (105), and China (66).

It almost goes without saying that Spain hadn't lost a friendly in a year, going into Wednesday's match.

Spain's biggest European rivals, those sides with more to prove, haven't taken it quite so easy on themselves. The average ranking of Italy's opponents, for instance, is 16 places higher than La Roja's since the beginning of 2011. And Germany, which lost to Spain in the semifinals of the 2010 World Cup, has spent the past two years scheduling opponents with an average FIFA ranking of 24.5, including four countries ranked in the top 10.

So while Germany's average exhibition foe roughly matches the quality of the Czech Republic's national team, Spain's is on the level of Estonia, Jamaica, or the Cape Verde Islands, all recent occupants of the 49th to 51st slots in world rankings.

Most countries set up their exhibition games like Internet dates. They reach out directly to several potential candidates, propose days and venues, and wait hopefully for a response. Details like splitting the bill and whether the teams will ever see each other again are sorted out later.

Spain, according to several officials from federations that have recently faced La Roja, along with a handful of other elite sides, are something of an exception. Most of Spain's exhibitions, particularly against smaller soccer countries like Puerto Rico or Venezuela, are set up by promoters who pony up huge appearance fees for the world champions to travel across the globe and school lesser opponents.

Maritza Casiano, a Puerto Rico-based promoter who was involved with organizing the Spain-Puerto Rico match in August, said Spain originally quoted her a price of $3.4 million to show up. That figure, she added, is typical. La Roja's appearance fee over the past two years has generally been in the $2 million to $4 million range, the highest of any national team. Argentina and Brazil, ask for roughly half of that. The Spanish soccer federation didn't respond to requests for comment.

World soccer's bigger fish usually put up the money themselves or have huge sponsorship deals that allow them to fund high-profile games. Unlike the minnows, they don't have to schedule home-and-home exhibition series where the hosts only cover the visitors' travel expenses.

"They've been doing this for years, so they are solid," Casiano said of the larger federations with longer histories. "But in Puerto Rico, we just started, so the money has to come from private promoters, private companies, sponsors and government."

But Puerto Rico found that even losing to the world champions could be a worthwhile investment. The federation received its largest appearance fee to date for the Spain game—$350,000—and the promoter said it was able to come out ahead. Dariel Collazo, the federation's general secretary, said the game was a turning point, immediately raising the team's profile and leading to more offers for exhibitions.

"There is a time before the Spain game and there is a time after," Collazo said. "Now people have seen that Puerto Rico is playing football and that we're doing things to improve."

Financial considerations aside, one of the few practical purposes of exhibition games for national team coaching staffs is to hone their squads before they get to meaningful games like World Cup qualifiers. (Club coaches see them more as inconveniences that rob their best players of much needed time off and expose them to potential injury.) England, for instance, experimented with a younger roster on Wednesday night, while France continued its great rebuilding project.

But Spain, after four years of dominance, knows its best lineup. And what few uncertainties remain —like who should start as the lone striker—are rarely resolved in no-stakes games against vastly inferior opponents.

Still, Lillo doesn't believe that La Roja particularly needs high-caliber exhibition matches. The old notion of using them as warm-ups for big tournaments, he said, is dead, because of the grueling demands of an 11-month club season. Besides, international exhibitions no longer carry the cachet they once did for players.

"Playing a match with the national squad is not such a big deal anymore," Lillo said. "In the 1970s, there were like five national matches per year, so being called was very important, more like playing a semifinal now."

So there are few objections to the greatest national side anyone can remember using exhibitions to cash in, particularly given the financial woes of Spanish soccer.

"Spain is taking advantage of a unique moment that we never had before," Lillo said, "and we don't know that we'll ever have again."

—David Roman contributed
to this article.