The 2026 World Cup Final
Messi, Rodri, Atlético Madrid and the key stats ahead of tonight’s final.
Despite the controversy surrounding this tournament for well over a year, much of it around FIFA, led by president Gianni Infantino, and his very public closeness to the US president, it is still disappointing that the World Cup comes to an end this evening. After 103 matches, the tournament reaches match 104. Spain Vs Argentina at the New York New Jersey Stadium, with an 8pm UK kick-off, 3pm local - although the closing ceremony starts 90 minutes before kick-off, featuring the likes of Robbie Williams and Nicole Scherzinger.
As has been the case since 1966, the World Cup final will be live in the UK on both BBC and ITV. It’s on a Sunday as usual too; only two finals in World Cup history haven’t been played on a Sunday: 1930 was on a Wednesday and 1966 was on a Saturday.
This is a short preview of the match, looking at some of the stats ahead of the showpiece event, broken into five main sections:
Atletico Madrid
‘The Complete Set’
Argentina & Lionel Messi
Spain &
England.
Atletico Madrid
In this final, there will be nine Atlético Madrid players across the two finalist squads. That means for the third World Cup in a row, no club has had a larger representation of players in the final. Atlético shared that honour in 2018 and 2022; this time they are well clear on their own.
Their nine is the highest finalist-squad representation since Peñarol’s nine players in the Uruguay squad that beat Brazil 2-1 in the ‘de facto’ final match in 1950. That 1950 match wasn’t officially a final, but it was the final match of the group stage with the winner taking the title. The overall record belongs to Slavia Prague, who had 11 players in Czechoslovakia’s 1934 finalist squad that lost 2-1 after extra time against Italy.
From a Scottish point of view, I did an article last week on World Cup Quarter-Finalists, semi-finalists and finalists to play their club football in Scotland at some stage in their career. Edson Braafheid, whose loan spell at Celtic in 2010 didn’t exactly live long in the memory, remains the only World Cup finalist to have played for a Scottish club in the season leading up to the tournament
The Complete Set
If Spain win tonight, as the bookies expect, then their midfield maestro Rodrigo Hernández Cascante, aka Rodri, will join a truly elite list of players to win what I’ve dubbed “the complete set”: the three highest honours in football, the World Cup, the European Cup or Champions League, and the Ballon d’Or.
He would be the first Spaniard to win all three, and the first player to complete the set since Ousmane Dembélé, the current holder of the Ballon d’Or, who won the award a year after Rodri. Lionel Messi finally completed his career with the World Cup win in 2022, becoming the first player to complete the set since Kaka in 2007. England’s Bobby Charlton was the first player to win all three. Fair play.
When I put together a list of the 10 players to have won all three awards, my first instinct was to look at who else had won two out of the three. I make it 61 players, and to keep the next graphic to a reasonable size, I have chosen about half of them. It’s always good to see a Scottish player make these kinds of lists, although my favourite player on it would be the Brazilian Ronaldo. It’s a travesty he didn’t win the Champions League. Thierry Henry can’t have been far away from a Ballon d’Or, either.
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