France 2-0 Morocco, Again: The First Semi-Finalist, by the Numbers

The first quarter-final produced the tournament’s first semi-finalist and an echo you couldn’t script: France 2–0 Morocco — the identical scoreline these two produced in the 2022 semi-final in Qatar. Four years later, a round earlier, same result. France move on to a July 14 semi-final against tonight’s Spain–Belgium winner; Morocco go home having controlled the ball and almost nothing else.

Sourcing. This is a short tournament note. All numbers come from our bundled match dataset — 97 completed matches as of July 10, from ESPN’s public scoreboard and match-summary feeds, served raw at /data/wc2026_results.json; the semi-final fixture comes from the same scoreboard’s published schedule. Nothing about unplayed fixtures is predicted.

The match: possession one way, shots the other

The shape of the game is all in two rows: Morocco won the ball (52% possession, 40 more passes) and France won everything the ball is for — 22 shots to 5, 8 on target to 1. That's a 4.4-to-1 shot ratio conceded by the team that had more of the play, and it extends a pattern this tournament keeps producing: in 18 of the 21 knockout games decided on the pitch, the winner has matched or beaten the loser on shots on target — and it’s now a perfect eight of eight since the round of 16 began (the three exceptions all came in the round of 32). Possession without penetration remains this World Cup’s most reliable way to lose.

France's ledger: 16-2, and a locked knockout door

Six games, 16 scored, 2 conceded — and both goals against came in the group stage. Across three knockout rounds France have won 6–0 on aggregate: nobody has scored on them since Norway on June 26, a run now at three matches and counting. The 14–2 goal difference they carried into this round (the best in the quarter-final field, as yesterday’s bracket note tabled) is now 16–2. It's worth saying plainly: the scorelines have tightened as the rounds hardened — 3–0, then 1–0, then 2–0 — but the sheet at the back hasn’t cracked once.

The suppression, game by game

The Morocco shot line wasn't an outlier; it was the sixth verse of the same song. France have now out-shot and out-targeted every opponent they've faced, and the aggregate is lopsided in a way scorelines only hint at: 110 shots taken to 38 conceded, 47 on target to 11. No opponent has managed more than four shots on target against them in a game; three of the six managed one or none.

For stage context: the tournament’s scoring has run 2.99 goals a game through the groups, 2.62 in the round of 32, and 2.88 in the round of 16 — and the quarter-finals open at 2.00 through one game. One game is one game; we’ll re-run the stage table when all four are in the dataset.

Morocco's farewell: the run ends the way the numbers said it might

Morocco exit as the tournament’s first quarter-final loser, and the profile holds up in hindsight. They arrived at this tie 10–4 across five games with the joint-most emphatic round-of-16 win (3–0 over Canada); they leave 10–6 across six. The 2022 semi-finalists’ return trip ends a round short of Qatar’s high-water mark — beaten both times, by the same opponent, by the same score. For the record books: France have now played Morocco twice in World Cup knockouts and won both without conceding.

Morocco’s own six-game shot ledger closes at 69 taken to 65 conceded, 26 on target to 20 — narrowly positive on every count, which is the quiet frustration of their tournament: they out-shot 4 of their six opponents and go home anyway, undone by the one fixture where the gap ran hardest the other way, 22–5. Good sides lose to great nights; this was one.

What's now set

The bracket’s top half is half-written: France await the Spain–Belgium winner on July 14 — that tie kicks off tonight, with Spain’s five-clean-sheet defense (9–0 across five games) meeting Belgium’s 13-goal attack on the shortest rest of the round, as covered in the rest-day note. The bottom half resolves over the weekend: Norway–England on July 11, Argentina–Switzerland in the overnight window, and the winners meet July 15. Wrap notes will follow each as the results land in the dataset.

One small bookkeeping note for readers of the field profiles: France entered the quarter-finals converting at roughly 16% — comfortably above the tournament’s 11.8% average — and a 2-goals-from-22-shots night (9%) was their least efficient finishing performance of the knockouts so far. It didn’t matter, because the other team managed one shot on target. Efficiency wins games; suppression wins tournaments. So far, France are running on both.