Spain vs Argentina Player Ratings:
Spain vs Argentina Player Ratings:It took 106 minutes and a moment of substitute magic to separate two sides that spent nearly two hours cancelling each other out. Here are our full Spain vs Argentina player ratings from Sunday’s final at MetLife Stadium, where Spain won 1-0 after extra time to lift their second World Cup.
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Spain
Unai Simón — 7/10. Barely tested in a match Argentina managed just two shots in across 120-plus minutes, but composed and alert whenever called upon, particularly in dealing with Argentina’s rare moments of urgency in extra time.
Pedro Porro — 7/10. Solid defensively throughout and, as he had all tournament, offered a genuine outlet going forward whenever Spain needed to change the picture down the right side.
Pau Cubarsí — 9/10. Immaculate again. The 19-year-old helped Spain to a clean sheet in seven of their eight tournament matches and was central to the pressure that eventually forced Enzo Fernández into the second yellow card that reduced Argentina to ten men, after a collision that sent Cubarsí cartwheeling to the turf. A fitting final performance from the tournament’s Best Young Player.
Aymeric Laporte — 8/10. The senior head at the back, composed in possession and instrumental in some of Spain’s best build-up sequences of the match, including the move that led to Oyarzabal’s early first-half chance.
Marc Cucurella — 7.5/10. A threat going forward all night, forcing a smart save from Emiliano Martínez with a shot from distance and giving Spain’s left side genuine attacking thrust throughout normal time.
Rodri — 10/10 (Man of the Match). Spain’s captain controlled every rhythm of the match from the base of midfield, dropping deep to help build attacks and repeatedly recycling possession under pressure. His performance capped a tournament that earned him the Golden Ball as the competition’s outstanding player — a fitting way to finish a summer in which few midfielders anywhere in the world looked more complete.
Fabián Ruiz — 8/10. Part of a midfield unit — alongside Rodri, Olmo and Baena — that crowded the center of the pitch and made it almost impossible for Argentina to string more than a couple of passes together out of possession.
Alex Baena — 8/10. Combined fluidly through the middle in the buildup to Spain’s best first-half chance, rotating positions with Ruiz to consistently drag Argentina’s midfield out of shape.
Dani Olmo — 8.5/10. A constant creative outlet centrally, benefiting from the gaps Spain’s midfield rotations created and continuing a tournament-long case as arguably Spain’s most complete two-way player outside of Rodri himself.
Mikel Oyarzabal — 7/10. Had Spain’s first genuine chance of the match, forcing a comfortable save from Martínez, before De la Fuente withdrew him in the 62nd minute in search of fresh legs — a substitution that would prove decisive.
Lamine Yamal — 7.5/10. Involved in Spain’s best chance late in normal time, beating two defenders and preventing the ball from going out of play before squaring for a golden opportunity that Martínez ultimately saved. A quieter final by his own recent standards, but still a persistent threat throughout.
Substitutes — Nico Williams (9/10) and Ferran Torres (9.5/10): The two players who won Spain the World Cup. Williams, introduced in the second half, combined with fellow substitute Torres in the second period of extra time, and Torres finished brilliantly to score the only goal of the match in the 106th minute. Neither had started, and both delivered when it mattered most.
Argentina
Emiliano Martínez — 7.5/10. Made several important saves to keep the match scoreless deep into extra time, including a smart stop to deny Yamal’s cutback attempt, and did everything he could behind a defense under near-constant pressure.
Cristian Romero — 7/10. Argentina’s most composed defender on the day, doing what he could to marshal a back line that faced wave after wave of Spanish pressure.
Lisandro Martínez — N/A. Forced off through injury in the 44th minute, replaced by Nicolás Otamendi, disrupting Argentina’s defensive setup right before the break.
Nicolás Otamendi (sub) — 6.5/10. Steady enough after his early introduction, but Argentina’s overall defensive structure never fully recovered its rhythm after the enforced change.
Nicolás Tagliafico — 6/10. Struggled to get forward and support Argentina’s attack, hemmed in by Spain’s relentless midfield control for long stretches.
Alexis Mac Allister — 6.5/10. Worked hard to disrupt Rodri’s influence, but was repeatedly caught in the space Spain’s rotating midfield created, leaving gaps for Cubarsí and Olmo to exploit.
Enzo Fernández — 5/10. Booked in the first half and sent off with a second yellow card in the third minute of second-half stoppage time, leaving his team to play the remainder of the match a man down.
Leandro Paredes — 6/10. Battled to give Argentina any foothold in midfield but was consistently outnumbered by Spain’s four-man rotation through the center of the pitch.
Lionel Messi — 6/10. A quiet final by the sport’s own extraordinary standard — 54 touches, just one shot, which was blocked, and zero touches inside Spain’s box across 120 minutes. He came closest to a genuine moment in the closing stages of extra time, but by then Argentina were chasing a game they’d barely threatened for two hours. Not the fairy-tale ending, but a career that speaks for itself regardless of Sunday’s scoreline.
Julián Álvarez — 6/10. Isolated for long spells as Argentina struggled to build any sustained attacking pressure, though he continued to work hard in a largely thankless afternoon.
Rodrigo De Paul — 6/10. Provided some defensive steel in midfield but couldn’t help Argentina generate any sustained spells of pressure against a Spain side dictating every phase of the match.
Substitutes (Argentina): Scaloni’s changes never quite found the spark he was looking for. The introduction of a pacier option in midfield, intended to inject fresh energy, instead left Argentina thinner defensively through the center of the pitch at exactly the moment Spain’s rotating midfield was beginning to dominate proceedings. None of Argentina’s bench options managed to replicate the impact Spain found from Williams and Torres at the other end.
The Bigger Picture
Spain’s ratings tell their own story — this was a genuinely collective performance, with almost every outfield starter grading well above average, and two substitutes combining for the winning goal. Argentina’s afternoon, by contrast, reads like a team that competed bravely without ever finding the attacking rhythm that had carried them through four dramatic knockout matches to reach the final in the first place. For Messi personally, the numbers are almost jarring given the standard he set across the rest of the tournament — but even a quiet final doesn’t erase a summer in which he became the World Cup’s all-time leading scorer. Sunday’s story, in the end, belonged to Spain’s collective discipline rather than any individual moment of magic.
It’s also worth noting how differently the two benches performed relative to expectations. Spain’s substitutes directly produced the match-winning goal for the second time in as many knockout rounds this tournament, following Mikel Merino’s pattern of impact substitutions earlier in the competition. Argentina’s changes, by contrast, never quite found the rhythm Scaloni was searching for, and in one case arguably left the team more exposed rather than less. In a final this tightly contested, that gap in bench impact ultimately proved to be the difference between lifting the trophy and falling agonizingly short of it.
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