The Quarter-Final Field, by the Numbers: Part Two

The round of 16 is done and the quarter-final field is set — seven names and one seat whose occupant our dataset can’t yet reveal. Part one profiled Morocco, France, Norway and England. Part two covers the rest: Spain, who have not conceded a goal all tournament; Belgium, who shoot more than anyone in the field; Argentina, the last perfect record standing — and both candidates for the eighth chair, Switzerland and Colombia, whose goalless tie went to kicks our feed doesn’t record. Profiling both is the honest move, and as it happens they’re the two most opposite teams in the tournament.

Sourcing. Computed from our bundled match dataset — 96 completed matches as of July 8 (ESPN scoreboard + match summaries), served raw at /data/wc2026_results.json. Each profile aggregates a team’s five games: three group matches, a round of 32, a round of 16. No projections, no bracket talk.

The field, side by side

* One of Switzerland and Colombia is through; their tie finished 0–0 and our snapshot stores scores, not shootouts.

Spain: five games, zero goals conceded

Spain’s headline number has no competition in this field and barely any precedent anywhere: nine scored, none conceded, five clean sheets in five games. Nobody else in the last eight has fewer than one against (Colombia) and nobody in part one had fewer than two (France). The shape is unmistakably Spanish — 65.6% average possession, highest in the field — but the attacking texture is odd: 18.6 shots a game converting at just 9.7%, below the tournament’s 11.8% average, making Spain the only confirmed quarter-finalist finishing below par. The file says grind: a 0–0 with Cape Verde despite 27 shots, a 1–0 over Uruguay from six, then routine handlings of Saudi Arabia, Austria and Portugal. A defence that concedes nothing buys an attack infinite patience — the exact inverse of Norway’s no-margin profile.

Belgium: the volume kings

Belgium attempt 21.4 shots a game — the most of any team in the tournament — and their five games sort into two different teams. The group version drew 1–1 with Egypt and 0–0 with Iran while piling up attempts (23 against Iran alone); the knockout version has scored twelve goals in three games — 5–1, 3–2, and the 4–1 that ended the hosts’ tournament, that last one delivered from a minority of possession with seven of fifteen shots on target. Their 30% on-target rate is the field’s lowest, which is what a throw-everything approach looks like; twelve knockout goals is what it looks like when it works.

Argentina: the last perfect record (with a caveat column)

Argentina are five wins from five — the only team left alongside France with a 100% record, and the more tested of the two: their last three finished 3–1, 3–2, 3–2. The attack is the field’s second-most clinical (18.7% conversion, 43% of shots on target) behind only Norway; the caveat is the other column, five conceded, four of them in the two knockout wins. Cape Verde and Egypt both took the champions of 2022 to a one-goal margin. Three goals in four of their five outings is a remarkable habit, but the defensive line behind it has been the loosest of any unbeaten side left.

The eighth chair: a wall or a blunt hammer

One of these two is a quarter-finalist; the honest file covers both, and they could hardly contrast more.

• Switzerland (3W–2D–0L, 9–3): the balanced candidate — modest volume (12.6 shots/g), healthy 14.3% conversion, a 4–1 over Bosnia and a win over co-host Canada on the file, unbeaten like everyone else here. A midfield-sized version of Morocco’s profile.
• Colombia (3W–2D–0L, 5–1): the extremist — one goal conceded in five games (only Spain’s zero beats it) attached to the surviving field’s weakest finishing: 18.8 shots a game converting at 5.3%, five goals all tournament, two 0–0s in their last three. They out-shoot almost everyone and score less than anyone — the purest volume-without-payoff profile in the tournament, a team-sized case study for the pressure-versus-payoff finding.

Whichever of them the shootout sent through, the quarter-final field’s pattern survives: seven of its eight members will have reached the last eight unbeaten in regulation, and at most one (Norway) with a defeat of any kind.

What the full field says

Part one’s finding — every qualifier converts above the tournament average — needed one game of part two to acquire its exceptions, and they’re instructive ones. Spain (9.7%) and possibly Colombia (5.3%) reach the last eight from below the conversion line, and both bought their passage the same way: by conceding almost nothing. The field now contains every archetype this tournament has produced — Norway’s finishing on minimal volume, Belgium’s volume with ordinary finishing, Spain’s defence-first grind, Argentina’s three-a-night balance — which makes the quarter-finals an unusually clean natural experiment in which profile survives contact with the others. We’ll report what happens, one completed match at a time.

Honest limitations

• Five games each; sums are not skill. Spain’s zero conceded includes three group games against the field’s weaker half; opponent strength is unadjusted throughout.
• No xG for 2026 — conversion mixes shot selection and finishing; our 2022 xG work shows how much that distinction matters.
• The eighth chair is genuinely unknown here. We profile both rather than guess; the quarter-final team sheets settle it within days.
• No bracket, no predictions. Pairings and dates for the quarter-finals aren’t in our results feed, and this series doesn’t forecast.

Sources

• The underlying math is worked through in Chapter 5: Introduction to Soccer Metrics (free, DataField.dev).
• Match results and team stats: ESPN public scoreboard + match-summary APIs, parsed to data_layer/wc2026_results.json (96 completed matches, retrieved 2026-07-08); served at /data/wc2026_results.json. Chart: charts/chart_wc2026_qf_part2.py.
• Part one: the first four quarter-finalists, profiled. The round’s conclusion: the round of 16 closes.
• The World Cup hub collects the whole series.