{"id":555865,"date":"2026-07-18T09:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T09:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/555865\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T09:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T09:46:08","slug":"world-cup-2026-how-do-spain-and-argentina-compare-before-the-final","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/555865\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup 2026: How do Spain and Argentina compare before the final?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sunday&#8217;s World Cup final pits holders Argentina against Spain. The South American champions against the European champions. How do they compare? This is the story of the numbers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Since two of their games went to extra time, Argentina have played an hour of football more than Spain at this tournament &#8211; so we have taken that into account by including the &#8216;per 90 minutes&#8217; version of each statistic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">With 19 goals, Argentina side have scored the most at the tournament, thanks mainly to some clinical finishing. They have now scored at least two goals in each of their past 13 World Cup games, since losing 2-1 to Saudi Arabia in their opening fixture four years ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Despite taking more shots, Spain have scored six goals fewer &#8211; as they have been average finishers so far, simply scoring as many goals as expected given the number and quality of their chances (13 scored, against an xG rating of 13.3).<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Argentina have actually only scored one more goal from inside the box but have been far more dangerous outside it, scoring five times while Spain are yet to score from distance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sunday&#8217;s World Cup final pits holders Argentina against Spain. The South American champions against the European champions. How&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-555865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}