Spain 1-0 Argentina: FIFA World Cup Final Match Report

Spain 1-0 Argentina, after 120 minutes, and a World Cup decided by the only goal either side managed in two hours of football. The scoreline is the most concise possible summary of the match: nothing separated these teams through ninety minutes, nothing separated them at half-time, and the tournament turned on a single moment in extra time.

Goalless at the break and goalless at full time is not a description of a poor final. It is a description of two sides who had reached this point by controlling matches rather than by winning shoot-outs, meeting each other and cancelling out. Spain had conceded once in the entire knockout phase before kick-off; Argentina had scored in every match of the tournament. One of those records had to break, and it was Argentina's.

The extra period is where the final was won, and the fact that it produced the only goal of the night says something about which side had more left. A goalless 120th minute would have taken this to penalties — the third shoot-out of the knockout rounds — and Spain avoided it by finding, once, the opening that had not existed since kick-off.

Spain arrived without conceding a goal in open competition for long stretches. They topped their group with seven points from a goalless draw against Cape Verde, a 4-0 win over Saudi Arabia and a 1-0 win against Uruguay — five scored, none conceded. The knockout run was equally controlled: 3-0 against Austria in the Round of 32, 1-0 against Portugal in the Round of 16, 2-1 against Belgium in the quarter-final and 2-0 against France in the semi-final. Seven matches, one goal conceded before the final.

Argentina's route was the more turbulent. Nine points from the group — 3-0 over Algeria, 2-0 over Austria, 3-1 against Jordan — gave way to a knockout phase of narrow escapes: 3-2 against Cape Verde Islands, 3-2 against Egypt, and a quarter-final against Switzerland that needed extra time to settle at 3-1 after being level at 1-1 through ninety minutes. The semi-final against England was won 1-2 from a goalless first half.

Two teams, then, with opposite tournament identities: Spain, who conceded almost nothing and won by controlling; Argentina, who scored in every match and won by outlasting. The final was decided in the phase where Argentina had already been taken twice — and this time they did not come through it.

Spain's second World Cup, and a defining one. The 2010 title was won with a 1-0 in extra time; so was this. A tournament run of seven matches with a single goal conceded before the final is the most complete defensive campaign of any recent champion, and it settles the argument about whether a side can still win a World Cup by suffocating opponents rather than outscoring them.

For Argentina it ends a knockout run built on resilience that finally ran out. Reaching a final having been taken to extra time in the quarter-final and having twice won 3-2 in single-goal margins is an achievement in itself; losing the final in the same phase where those escapes were made is a hard symmetry.

The wider verdict on the tournament is written in this scoreline. The expanded format produced a champion that conceded one goal in seven matches before the final, and a final that took 120 minutes to yield a single goal. Whatever else the 48-team World Cup changed, it did not make the last match easier to win.