The field of 48 has whittled down to just Spain and Argentina. How should each team be feeling heading into the semifinals?

The World Cup happens like the famous Ernest Hemingway line about going bankrupt. It happens very gradually, and then all at once. 

From June 12 through June 27, we spent two weeks and 72 matches eliminating just 16 teams. Just two weeks after that, we’re down to the last two. 

The final stages of the tournament has been both the best case scenario and a little bit underwhelming. It was the best case because Argentina, France, Spain, and England are the top four teams in the world and that is good, because it means that the biggest games have been contested by the best teams. 

It was also a little bit underwhelming because underdogs and surprise stories are part of what makes the World Cup so great, and having the last four remaining teams also be the four teams that were most likely to make the semifinals before a ball was kicked is sort of a bummer.

But after an immensely impressive Spanish victory over France and Argentina slowly breaking England psychologically, we are all set for what promises to be a great final. Here is one defining question for each team.

Has 2026 Spain been 2010 Spain the whole time?

In the wake of their triumph at the 2024 Euros, many observers — myself included — fell in love with the idea of the modern Spain team as a sort of evolution of the great Spanish sides of the early 2010s.

The premise was basically this: In the late 2000s, Pep Guardiola ushered in a new era of possession-based football with his Barcelona sides. These were teams that dominated the ball and scored a ton of goals both because of intricate passing and movement, and because when that intricate passing and movement didn’t work they also had Lionel Messi.

Those Barcelona teams formed the backbone of the Spanish national team that won everything there is to win from 2008 through 2012 — except they frequently didn’t score a ton of goals because Leo Messi is Argentinian, so when all the intricate passing and movement didn’t work they just kind of passed the ball more.

As a result, those Spanish teams didn’t carve their opposition open so much as they suffocated them, winning games by nullifying any opposing attack by just keeping the ball the entire game. They were masters of defensive possession. The perfect encapsulation of that era was a win like their round of 16 victory  over Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal on their way to capturing the 2010 World Cup: A 1-0 win in which they had 61% of the possession and held Portugal to just three shots on goal.

Things went a little bit haywire for La Roja as the core of the 2010 team aged out, but they were a genuine revelation at the Euros two summers ago. Primarily this was because of the added twist of wing play from Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams, both of whom added a level of Messi-adjacent gamebreaking dribbling.

Heading into this World Cup, the assumption was that 2026 Spain would continue on that same trajectory. The fundamentals of the pass-and-move style established 20 years ago would allow them to dominate in the midfield, and their stars on the wings would turn that possession into goals.

But instead, it has been 2010 all over again. This summer, Spain have been one of the dominant defensive possession teams in World Cup history. Through 360 minutes of World Cup knockout football, Spain’s opponents have managed just 1.6 expected goals combined, for an average of about 0.4 expected goals per 90 minutes. To translate that, Spain’s opponents in the knockout rounds have on average only been able to generate less than half a goal’s worth of scoring chances per game. And that’s excluding the part of the tournament where they played against Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde and a weirdly hapless Uruguay. 

On the other hand, with both Yamal and Williams struggling to get healthy, it has also been tough for Spain to score goals. Even in their dominant semifinal victory over France, they needed a penalty to open the scoring. And no matter how dominant you are defensively, the defining fact of the sport is that really weird stuff happens, and a 1-0 lead is never completely safe.

In 2010, Spain were unbeatable. But they also won the final in part because of two huge breakaway misses by Arjen Robben. 

Spain will more than likely control the game against Argentina. But if they’re going to actually win it, they are going to need to find a way to insulate themselves from the risk of a not very good chance turning into a goal — something that can definitely happen when Messi is on the other team.

Sixteen years ago, a defensively dominant Spain team got two lucky breaks before Andres Iniesta fired them into history. On Sunday, they will need their possession to not only prevent Messi from creating those kinds of chances, but to also set up Yamal and Williams and Mikel Oyarzabal to score the goals that they need to win. 

How many times can Argentina do this, and can they do it against an actually good team?

In international soccer, you either retire a perennial choker or you keep playing for long enough to see yourself become the perpetual winner that everyone hates.

To a large extent, the story of the 2026 World Cup is that the soccer watching world hates Argentina now. Four years ago, their helter skelter, always on the edge of losing run to the World Cup had the air of romance.

There was a built-in narrative: Lionel Messi’s quest to finally capture the biggest trophy in the sport, the lone accomplishment that had eluded him.

For over a decade, Messi had been the best player in the world, but had experienced a series of increasingly absurd tragedies when trying to win a trophy with Argentina. In 2016, he even briefly retired from international soccer after losing in three major international finals in three consecutive summers. 

Last World Cup, it felt like much of the world were rooting for Messi to finally get his hands on the trophy, with many putting aside their general disdain for Argentinian football and its associated antics to see the greatest of all time finally complete his resume. 

Four years later, Argentina are undisputed villains of this World Cup, subject to long, mostly justified thinkpieces about racism from fans and occasionally from players and long, mostly unjustified online conspiracy theories about FIFA rigging the tournament their way.¹My very quick take on the various refereeing controversies across Argentina’s knockout run is that it basically the same thing that happens every time that a juggernaut team is getting calls: For an underdog to win a game, they need to get lucky to some extent. Sometimes, that luck comes in the form of a refereeing decision going your way, or the referee not noticing a foul. With many of these VAR decisions — and particularly Egypt’s disallowed goal in the round of 16 — it feels unjust because that little bit of luck that the underdog needs has suddenly been taken away. But the calls have been mostly correct, even if it a bummer that they thwarted what would have been great upsets. The basic sentiment after every improbably narrow Argentina win is the image of Aaron Paul in Breaking Bad crying “He can’t keep getting away with it.”

But maybe they can?

Argentina’s gameplan is perhaps not as unsustainable as the dramatic nature of the wins makes it seem. For the most part, they set up so that Messi can pick 20 or 30 minutes across the match in which he can play at full speed. While Messi picks and chooses his moments, the rest of the team mostly sets up to ensure that as little soccer as possible happens elsewhere, either by fouling the other team out of the game or by keeping possession without trying particularly hard to score. 

It’s a plan that more or less works, maximizing Argentina’s ability to create chances by giving Messi the best opportunity to be the best player in the world for as long as he can still manage it, and minimizing opposing chances by making the rest of the game pretty much not exist.

Even their most miraculous comeback Egypt, pretty much went according to the plan. Argentina generated 2.84 expected goals in that game to just 0.89 from Egypt. The  20 minutes of Messi greatness only happened after they were 2-0 down, but Argentina still put together a game in which they had better scoring chances across 90 minutes than their opposition. Teams usually win when they do that. 

But that’s not strictly what happened against England, and it might not be a suitable plan against Spain. 

Rather than actually outplaying the Three Lions in the semifinal, Argentina played a pretty much even game for 70 or so minutes. The Telegraph enumerated and bemoaned all 31 “dirty tricks” that Argentina used to defeat England, but if you read the article, all of those petty fouls and sneaky shoves happened when the game was tied. Argentina’s dark arts didn’t help them win, so much as they made the game not happen for around 60 minutes.

Until England scored, Argentina didn’t really do much offensively either. In the first half, they only registered two fairly tame shots from distance. They limited their opponents but didn’t create chances the other way. The plan was not working.

Insofar as it eventually did, it was also because of a collective decision by England’s players to simply give up on having the ball or attacking, which was then reinforced by extremely defensive substitutions from Thomas Tuchel. Without any threat going the other way or really having to expend any effort to get the ball back when they lost it, Messi and company were able to park in the England final third and start knocking on the door for the first time in the game. 

Spain are much less likely to concede control of the game the way that England did. And while Argentina have won plenty of close games on their way to the final, they have not yet played a game that was truly even, in which the other team was actually holding the ball and creating chances at the same level as them. 

Against Cape Verde and Egypt and Switzerland, Argentina were sucker punched in games that they were otherwise dominating. Those games felt nervy, sure, but all they had to do to win was stick to the script.

Spain, on the other hand,  are not going to be outplayed over 90 minutes. They are probably going to have more of the ball, and Argentina won’t be able to kill off the game while Messi waits in the wings the same way they could against everyone else.

Spain will be a different game for Argentina. And while they might be able to pull off one last job, the schematics of this heist will have to be much different than their previous four. 

They could get away with it again, but not if they try to play the same way they have throughout the tournament.