France 0-2 Spain: Two Shots on Target, and the Streak Dies

This note is two days late and the first of two published today — the semi-finals played Tuesday and Wednesday, and both results are now in the dataset. First, Tuesday: France 0–2 Spain, and Spain are in the July 19 final. The headline stat is almost a paradox: France matched Spain on shots, edged them on shots on target, split the possession down the middle — and lost by two. In doing so, this match killed the one pattern we said we’d defend with money.

Sourcing. One completed match, one ledger update. The numbers come from our bundled match dataset — 102 completed matches, refreshed July 17, from ESPN’s public scoreboard and match-summary feeds, served raw at /data/wc2026_results.json. The feed carries team box scores only — no player data — and nothing about unplayed fixtures is predicted.

The match: even everywhere except the net

Ten shots each, a 50.9–49.1 possession split, thirty passes between them. The preview noted that possession is zero-sum and one of these teams would spend the evening under 50% for effectively the first time; the answer was France, at 49.1% — but the real surprise is what France did to Spain’s half of the equation. Spain arrived averaging 66.0% of the ball, the most of any team in the tournament, and never once out-possessed; they kept the ball Tuesday by 1.8 points, their narrowest share of all seven games and more than fifteen points under their average. France dragged the tournament’s control team into a dead-even fight. Then Spain won the only column that ends arguments: two shots on target, two goals. France put three on target and scored none of them. On a night when every structural number cancelled out, the entire margin lived in the finishing.

The suppression held — on both sides

The preview’s framing for this tie was two suppression machines, and both machines ran. France came in averaging 18.3 shots and 7.8 on target a game; Spain held them to 10 and 3 — France’s lowest shot count of the tournament (their previous floor was 11, in the opener against Senegal) and their first scoreless game in seven. Spain came in averaging 18.3 shots themselves; France held them to 10, their second-lowest of the tournament. Even the corner count — 7–1 France, Spain’s season low — only underlines how little clean territory either side conceded, and how little corners settle (the out-cornering team wins 52% of the time; Tuesday it lost by two). The combined 20 shots made this France’s quietest attacking game of the tournament and Spain’s second-quietest (only the six-shot Uruguay grind sat lower), and the 0–2 scoreline arrived not through volume but through a 20% conversion night — Spain’s most efficient finishing of the tournament, on one of their thinnest volumes.

The shots-on-target streak is dead

Now the bookkeeping we owe. Since the round of 16 began, every knockout tie decided on the pitch had gone to the team that matched or beat its opponent on shots on target — eleven straight when the semi-finals kicked off. France won the shots-on-target battle 3–2 and lost the match. The streak died at eleven. The fuller ledger the preview insisted on quoting alongside it — 21 of 24 decided knockout games, because the round of 32 had already produced three exceptions — now reads 22 of 26 after both semis, and this match joins Norway–Ivory Coast, the United States–Bosnia and Portugal–Croatia as the fourth exception. This is exactly why the preview kept the 21-of-24 framing next to the 11-for-11 one: a pattern that holds 85% of the time is a tendency, and tendencies take nights off. We wrote that the semi-finals were “under no obligation to extend” the streaks. Tuesday, one of them declined.

Spain's ledger: 13–1, and the Belgium goal is still the only one

Seven games: 13 scored, 1 conceded, six clean sheets, unbeaten, and Belgium remain the only team to score on them. The aggregates: 120 shots to 44, 42 on target to 10, never out-shot, never out-possessed. Two firsts hide in the France row, though. It was the first time all tournament Spain were out-targeted — through six games no opponent had managed more shots on target than them (Uruguay’s 1–1 was the only even split) — and the first time they won a game they didn’t statistically dominate. That may be the most useful thing the semi-final revealed: the previous six wins all came with the machine humming; this one came with the machine jammed, and they won anyway. One historical note from outside the dataset, stated because it is simple public record: this is Spain’s first World Cup final since the one they won in 2010.

France's farewell: a 6–0 knockout run ends 6–2

France exit with six wins, then one defeat — 16 scored, 4 conceded across seven games. Nobody had scored on them since Norway on June 26 — a shutout run of three full matches — and their knockout aggregate stood at 6–0 when Tuesday kicked off; it closes 6–2. The full-ledger numbers still read like a champion’s: 120 shots taken to 48 conceded, 50 on target to 13, never out-shot in seven games (Tuesday’s 10–10 was the only even split), four clean sheets. And here the dataset’s running joke completes itself: France and Spain entered this match with exactly 110 shots each, took exactly ten each, and leave it with exactly 120 each. Identical volume across seven games, one match apart in outcome — the difference across an entire tournament is the finishing, which is a sample-size sermon we’ll spare you because the box score just delivered it.

One honest word on rest. The preview’s table gave France five days to Spain’s four, and the better-rested team lost — while in the quarter-finals, Belgium’s three-day turnaround preceded a flat performance and defeat. Two uneven-rest results, pointing in opposite directions. That is what a sample of two looks like, and it is why the rest tables in this series carry descriptions rather than conclusions.

The companion note on Wednesday’s semi-final — England 1–2 Argentina, and what the final now looks like — publishes today alongside this one. A full final preview follows once we’ve done the arithmetic justice: Spain v Argentina, July 19, one game left in the dataset’s tournament.

Sources

• Match results and team stats: ESPN public scoreboard + match-summary APIs, parsed to data_layer/wc2026_results.json (102 completed matches, retrieved 2026-07-17); served at /data/wc2026_results.json. All numbers computed from that snapshot.
• The set-up this note pays off: the semi-finals preview, in data. Both teams’ roads here: France’s quarter-final wrap and Spain’s quarter-final wrap.
• The other semi-final: England 1–2 Argentina, wrapped.
• The World Cup hub collects the whole series.