There is a particular cruelty to tournament football that no amount of tactical preparation can immunise you against. You can defend resolutely for seventy minutes, weather the storm, watch your goalkeeper make four saves of genuine quality, draw level through a powerful header, and still lose — because a substitute you had barely clocked coming off the bench steps onto the pitch with four minutes remaining and converts a fumble into a World Cup semi-final place. Belgium experienced that cruelty in full on a sun-scorched afternoon at Los Angeles Stadium. Spain experienced something else entirely: the feeling that destiny is not merely on their side, but actively conspiring on their behalf.
The final score, Spain 2–1 Belgium, tells you almost nothing about how this match actually unfolded. It does not tell you that Thibaut Courtois was arguably the best player on the pitch before his leg gave way in the seventy-first minute, or that Belgium twice came within centimetres of a lead they would have thoroughly deserved, or that the margin of victory arrived via a goalkeeper error so catastrophic it will follow Senne Lammens for the remainder of his career. What the scoreline does tell you — unambiguously and without nuance — is that Spain are in the semi-finals of the 2026 World Cup, and that a man named Mikel Merino has somehow done it again.
A System Built to Suffocate, and What Happened When It Was Challenged
Luis de la Fuente set his Spain out in their familiar 4-2-3-1, a shape that has become less a tactical selection and more a philosophical statement over the course of this tournament. Unai Simón behind a back four of Pedro Porro, Pau Cubarsí, Aymeric Laporte, and Marc Cucurella; Rodri and Fabián Ruiz as the double pivot; Lamine Yamal and Álex Baena wide, Dani Olmo in the ten position; Mikel Oyarzabal leading the line. Belgium, shorn of the injured Youri Tielemans before a ball had even been kicked — he damaged himself in the warm-up, which rather captures the fortune that has stalked this squad all tournament — organised defensively and looked to Kevin De Bruyne to manufacture something in the spaces between Spain’s lines.
The first half was, in the way that Spain first halves often are, a careful and slightly oppressive kind of entertainment. Spain circulated. Belgium sat. The tempo was controlled, the spaces were tight, and if you were watching with tactical intent you would have been admiring the precision of the press and the way Rodri managed the room between the lines. If you were watching for drama, you were waiting.
The drama arrived in two bursts, each punctuating what had been a period of patient, almost academic possession football with the abruptness of a full stop mid-sentence.
The first came in the thirtieth minute. Yamal and Porro combined down Spain’s right flank with the kind of casual authority that has become routine for this side, and Dani Olmo arrived to strike what should have been the opening goal — but Courtois, who had been monumental throughout, got enough on the shot to deflect it. The rebound, however, fell to Fabián Ruiz, who had no interest in allowing Courtois a second act of heroism and hammered it into the net. Ruiz’s first goal of the tournament. Spain one, Belgium nil.
Eleven minutes later, Belgium did something they had not done to Spain in six consecutive World Cup matches spanning two tournaments. They scored. Timothy Castagne’s cross from the right was met by Charles De Ketelaere, who muscled past Cubarsí in the air with an assertiveness that the young Barcelona defender will want to review carefully, and powered a header past Unai Simón. It was, in the context of this tournament, a genuinely historic moment — though not one Belgium will celebrate in isolation. De Ketelaere’s goal ended a clean sheet run of six hundred and forty-nine consecutive World Cup minutes. A record that had stood, unchallenged and largely unacknowledged, for thirty-six years was gone.
The Record That Stood Since Caniggia Was Young
In the summer of 1990, in a tournament played in Italy that produced some of the most brutally defensive football the World Cup has ever witnessed, a goalkeeper called Walter Zenga kept a clean sheet for five complete matches and most of a sixth. He conceded in the sixty-seventh minute of the semi-final against Argentina — Claudio Caniggia’s header — by which point he had been unbeaten for five hundred and eighteen minutes. That record endured through Schmeichel and Buffon and Casillas and Neuer and an entire age of goalkeeping evolution, untouched, until Unai Simón broke it during Spain’s Round of 16 match against Austria, surpassing Zenga’s mark and pushing his own tally to five hundred and nineteen minutes without conceding.
Simón’s sequence was extraordinary in its own right: it stretched back into the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, accumulated across six consecutive clean sheets spanning those two World Cup tournaments, and represented something close to a collective defensive feat as much as an individual one. Spain do not concede easily. They press high, they defend deep when necessary, and their back four has the kind of positional discipline that makes opposing forwards feel as though they are trying to find a gap in a wall that keeps rearranging itself.
De Ketelaere’s header ended all of that. Zenga, from somewhere in Italy, will have permitted himself a small, dignified satisfaction.
The Injury That Changed Everything
The second half was tense in the manner of a match that both teams sensed could go either way without warning. Yamal continued to be a persistent problem for Belgium’s right side — he hit the post from outside the box at some point in the second period, a shot that deserved better — and Lammens was called upon to make a fine stop from Oyarzabal at the right-hand post. De Bruyne had a shot saved at the other end. The match felt balanced, coiled, waiting.
Then, in the seventy-first minute, Belgium lost Courtois.
The Belgian goalkeeper had been, by some distance, the reason the scoreline remained level. He had made four saves of genuine quality in the first half alone, and his presence between the posts carried the authority of a man who has spent his career making the extraordinary appear routine. When he went down clutching what appeared to be a leg injury and was unable to continue, there was a shift in the atmosphere that was almost tangible. Not gloating — the Los Angeles crowd was not cruel about it — but a dawning awareness that the complexion of the match had changed in a way that no amount of tactical adjustment could fully address.
Senne Lammens replaced him. He would not be blamed for what happened next if you were feeling generous. But football is not always a generous sport.
Merino, Again
In the eighty-sixth minute, Luis de la Fuente sent on Mikel Merino. The Arsenal midfielder had played this role before. Four days — ninety-six hours — after coming off the bench in the ninetieth minute against Portugal and burying a winner that sent Spain into the last eight, here he was again, pulling on the substitute’s bib with the quiet composure of a man who has come to regard the dying minutes of knockout football as his natural habitat.
Two minutes later, it was over.
Pau Cubarsí, the young defender who had been beaten in the air for Belgium’s equaliser, struck a long-range effort that was ambitious at best and speculative at worst. Lammens gathered it — or tried to. The ball squirmed from his grasp, fell loose inside the six-yard box, and Merino, arriving with the timing that seems to be written into him at some biological level, smashed it into the net. Spain two, Belgium one.
He stood in front of the Spanish supporters with his arms wide and an expression that suggested he cannot quite believe it either. Later, he articulated it plainly: “Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined achieving what’s happening.” There is something genuinely disarming about that — a player who has now rewritten the World Cup record books as a substitute scorer in knockout matches still processing the scale of what he has done.
To be precise about the record: Merino is now the first substitute in the history of the World Cup to score the winning goal in two different knockout stage matches. Not just in this tournament. In the history of the competition. He joined the pitch as a second-half replacement in both instances, scored within minutes on both occasions, and sent Spain into the next round each time. The statisticians reached for their spreadsheets; Anders reached for something stronger.
The Clearance, and the Final Whistle
In stoppage time, with Spain clinging to their lead, Belgium generated one last opportunity. Aymeric Laporte was there — it was Laporte, typically, because centre-backs of his experience do not abandon their responsibilities in the ninetieth minute — and he cleared off the line to preserve the result. A detail that might be forgotten in the Merino narrative but deserves its moment: a calm, authoritative intervention from a man who has been quietly excellent throughout this tournament without receiving a fraction of the attention his performances merit.
The final whistle came. Spain were through.
A Golden Generation, Gilded No More
For Belgium, this is the end. Not merely of the tournament — though it is that too — but of something larger and longer and considerably more melancholy. Thibaut Courtois, Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Youri Tielemans: the generation of Belgian players who arrived in the early 2010s carrying the weight of an entire nation’s expectation have now exited the World Cup at the quarter-final stage for the third time in four tournaments. They finished third in 2018, which remains their high-water mark. They went out in the group stage in Qatar. And now, in Los Angeles, having beaten the USA four goals to one and survived a late drama against Senegal, they lose to Spain through a combination of bad luck, bad timing, and a substitute goalkeeper’s error on a day when their own goalkeeper — arguably the world’s best — was carried off before the game was decided.
There is something almost theatrical about the manner of it. The thigh injury that hampered De Bruyne and restricted his involvement in the knockouts. Onana suffering a torn ACL during the Round of 16 victory against the United States and ruled out for the remainder of the tournament after medical tests confirmed the severity of the injury days later. Tielemans not even making it to kick-off. And then Courtois, the last line and in many ways the most important figure on the pitch, giving way with twenty minutes remaining in the quarter-final of a World Cup that Belgium had genuine cause to believe they might win. Fortune did not merely desert them. It turned its back and walked away.
The golden generation label has always carried within it an implicit question: golden enough to win something? The answer, after three major tournaments worth of evidence, is no. That is not a criticism of the players — it is a recognition that the space between exceptional and historic is vast, and that most generations, however talented, never cross it. Belgium’s did not. They will be remembered fondly, but that is not quite the same thing as being remembered triumphantly.
What Comes Next: France, Dallas, July 14
Spain will face France in the semi-final at AT&T Stadium in Dallas on July 14, and it is difficult to resist the billing. Lamine Yamal against Kylian Mbappé. A teenager who will not turn nineteen until July 13 — three days after this match — against the most decorated active footballer in the world. Spain’s collective against France’s individual brilliance, which is not quite what France are, but is the version of the story that writes itself most easily. Mbappé leads the Golden Boot race outright on eight goals, having overtaken Lionel Messi — the tiebreaker of three assists to Messi’s one proving decisive — and France dispatched Morocco two-nil without excessive complication in their quarter-final.
Spain, for their part, come into this match having conceded precisely one goal in their last six knockout games across two World Cup tournaments. That one goal was De Ketelaere’s header. Before that, six hundred and forty-nine minutes of nothing. Their defensive record is not incidental to their success — it is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure. They allow Yamal to take risks, Ruiz to arrive late, Merino to gamble in the final minutes, because they trust implicitly that the back four will cover the exposure those decisions create.
Whether that system can contain Mbappé — who is, when he is running at full pace in the channels, something that does not map neatly onto any tactical framework — is the question that will occupy the next four days. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the great World Cup semi-final match-ups, and the anticipation sits perfectly alongside the last embers of Los Angeles still warm on the evening of July 10.
And Merino, Still Processing It All
In the mixed zone beneath Los Angeles Stadium, surrounded by cameras and microphones and the particular noise of a World Cup quarter-final aftermath, Mikel Merino stood and said that not even his wildest dreams had prepared him for this. It was the most honest thing said in football all day.
He came on in the eighty-sixth minute. He scored in the eighty-eighth. He became the first player in World Cup knockout history to score as a substitute in consecutive knockout matches — a feat without precedent across the entire history of the competition. And he did it with the composure of someone who has spent his whole career preparing for moments that the rest of us spend our whole careers hoping to witness even once.
Spain march on. Belgium go home. And somewhere in the footballing cosmos, a record that stood since 1990 and another that stood since the competition began lie quietly broken, bearing the fingerprints of a squad that refuses, with great stubbornness and considerable style, to make anything easy — and yet somehow always finds a way through.