By Opta Analyst | Created at 2026-06-15 19:20:05 | Updated at 2026-06-16 09:19:36
14 hours ago
Cape Verde made history by drawing with the European champions on Monday night. Here are the numbers behind the shock of the World Cup so far.
One of the many issues that has been raised with this World Cup has been that the expanded format would bring the overall quality of the tournament down. By increasing the number of sides involved from 32 to 48, there has been some concern that we’d end up with too many poor teams.
The feared result of this, it has been suggested, would be too many one-sided fixtures, too many gulfs in quality, which would lead to a lack of competitiveness in the group stages.
When the draw was made, this fixture, between Spain and Cape Verde, would have been highlighted early on as a contender to be one of those very games. And after Germany put seven past Curaçao on Sunday, there was plenty of expectation that this one could be even more unbalanced.
Everyone, understandably, expected a comfortable Spain win. The European champions, ranked second in the FIFA world rankings before the game, were facing World Cup debutants, who kicking it with the likes of Honduras, the United Arab Emirates and North Macedonia down in 67th in the rankings.
Cape Verde, with a population of around half a million, had become the second-least populous nation ever to qualify for a World Cup when they confirmed their place in this competition (only to be later overtaken by Curaçao). Spain, meanwhile, have long been a giant of world football.
In 25,000 pre-match simulations of this bout run by the Opta supercomputer, Spain were victorious 87.2% of the time. Cape Verde got a draw just 8.1% of the time.
But against the odds, the minnows shut their frustrated opponents out to earn a truly remarkable and genuinely historic goalless draw. In their first ever World Cup match, they avoided defeat against the team who won the European Championship only two years ago.
Predictably, Cape Verde didn’t put in the most adventurous of attacking performances. Unsurprisingly, Spain had most of the ball, ending the game with 74.2% possession and a field tilt – which compares the number of passes completed in the attacking thirds of the pitch – of 96.7%. In other words, Spain completely dominated both possession and territory.
Cape Verde did try to attack, but they just couldn’t keep hold of the ball and get anywhere near the Spain goal with any kind of regularity. They had just four shots totalling 0.07 xG before the 90th minute, after which point Spain had lost all shape as they threw players forward to try and find a winner. Cape Verde centre-back Diney Borges had a header to win it from a last-gasp corner but put his effort straight at goalkeeper Unai Simón.
Spain, with a team stacked full of players from many of the best teams in the world, kept hold of the ball for most of the match and pushed relentlessly for a route to goal. However, they struggled terribly to find a route through the stubborn Cape Verde defence.
They completed 734 passes, but only a tiny proportion of them caused their opponents any kind of problem. They found it incredibly difficult to find a way through, as their pass map from the game shows.
Their struggles from the start were highlighted by how little they found centre-forward Mikel Oyarzabal, who became the first player to play the first 30 minutes of a World Cup match (since 1966) without touching the ball even once.
Spain did eventually manage to find him a little more often, and in the end racked up 27 shots totalling 2.29 xG, though too many of them were pot shots from distance. And when they did get a clear sight of goal, they were let down by some poor finishing, particularly from Oyarzabal and Ferran Torres.
This game extended Spain’s playing time without finding the net at the World Cup to almost three full matches, their last goal coming 11 minutes into their penultimate at the 2022 edition, vs Japan. They then failed to score against Morocco in the semi-final, and they have now had 49 shots and completed 2,500 passes since they last scored a World Cup goal.
It was far from the case that Spain playing badly was the only reason this game ended goalless. Cape Verde’s defenders were magnificent. Borges made a match-high five tackles; his central-defensive partner Pico Lopes led the game for clearances, with 11. The team’s exceptional discipline is shown in the fact that despite Spain having almost three-quarters of the ball, Cape Verde’s players committed only one foul – the fewest by a team in a World Cup match on record (since 1966).
But their goalkeeper, Vozinha, was the star of the show. He saved all seven of the shots on target he faced, meaning that, at 40 years and 12 days old, he became the third-oldest goalkeeper to keep a clean sheet in a World Cup match, after Peter Shilton (40 years, 281 days) and Dino Zoff (40 years, 130 days). Meanwhile, the only goalkeeper aged 40+ to make more saves in a World Cup game on record (since 1966) was Pat Jennings, on his 41st birthday, for Northern Ireland against Brazil in 1986 (10).
It wasn’t a win, but this was still as historic a result as they come. The 65-place difference between the sides is the biggest for any team that avoided defeat in a World Cup game (rankings were first published in 1993).
An incredible performance and an even more incredible result, which has, single-handedly, proven that there was no need to worry about the mismatches at this 48-team World Cup.
