One shot. One touch. One World Cup career, over.
Spain beat Portugal 1-0 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on July 7, 2026, in a World Cup Round of 16 tie decided by substitute Mikel Merino’s goal deep into stoppage time. Cristiano Ronaldo, at 41 and almost certainly playing his last major tournament, finished the night without a single chance created in 17 attempts on goal across the competition, the most shots recorded by any player at a World Cup without a single assist to show for it. Spain move on to face either the United States or Belgium in the quarterfinal.
Merino settled it in the first minute of stoppage time. Ferran Torres, on for Alex Baena, threaded a clever pass through for the Arsenal midfielder, who took one touch and slotted it low into the bottom left corner past Diogo Costa. That was the only goal of the match, and it came from Spain’s fourth and fifth substitutes combining inside two minutes of each other.
Here is the direct answer for anyone who only wants the essentials. Spain won 1-0. Merino scored in the 90th plus first minute, assisted by Torres. Portugal finished with an expected goals total of 0.63 against Spain’s 1.69, a gap that tells you plainly who deserved it, even in a match that spent long stretches going nowhere.
Spain started the sharper side, and it showed inside ten minutes. Mikel Oyarzabal was clean through in the eighth minute after a Dani Olmo throughball, only to drag his shot wide of the right post with just Costa to beat. It was the kind of miss that looks costly in hindsight and, for a while, threatened to be the difference between a routine Spain win and this long grind toward stoppage time.
Portugal’s best moment of the entire ninety minutes arrived just before the break, and it was pure fortune rather than design. Nuno Mendes struck a clean effort from the edge of the box that took a heavy deflection off Pedro Porro and cannoned back off the crossbar. Diogo Costa was needed twice more before halftime, parrying a low Lamine Yamal effort and then denying Alex Baena on the rebound within the same attack, a double save that kept the tie level at the interval.
The pace slowed considerably after halftime, and truthfully, neither side offered much for a long time. Portugal sat in and looked to break, Spain probed patiently without real urgency, and the game settled into exactly the kind of stalemate that suited the team already ahead on the underlying numbers. Mendes limped off injured in the 56th minute, a blow that Roberto Martinez’s side never quite recovered from defensively down that flank.
Truth is, the match needed something close to a shock to spark back into life, and neither team looked capable of producing it through normal channels. Ronaldo rolled back the years with flashes of movement but could not force a clear sight of goal. Bernardo Silva came on in the 83rd minute and nearly wrote himself into Portuguese folklore, rising to meet a Francisco Conceicao cross in the dying seconds of stoppage time, only to flick his header onto the roof of the net.
There is a contradiction worth sitting with here. Spain were the better side by most measures and still needed their sixth and seventh substitutes to combine for the winner in the twelfth minute of stoppage time. Both of those things are completely true, and neither cancels the other out.