Two Goals From Oyarzabal Send Spain Cruising Past Austria
Eleven goals in his last ten appearances for Spain. That is the number Mikel Oyarzabal carried into this one, and by full time it had grown again.
Spain beat Austria 3-0 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, on July 3, 2026, in a Round of 32 match at the 2026 World Cup. Oyarzabal scored in the 36th and 89th minutes, with Pedro Porro heading in a second in between, and none of it should have surprised anyone who watched Spain rack up 2.80 expected goals to Austria’s 0.32 across the ninety minutes.
Marc Cucurella supplied the connective tissue for the whole performance, setting up two of the three goals from the left flank. He teed up Oyarzabal for the opener, then did the same for the striker’s second late on. In between, Alex Baena pulled the ball back for Porro to head home. Austria never had an answer for it, finishing with zero shots on target against Spain’s ten.
The early signs actually pointed toward a contest. Lamine Yamal forced a save from Alexander Schlager inside the first minute, and Austria settled into a spell of their own, working the ball around with 44 percent of the possession through the opening quarter hour. Cucurella thought he had broken through in the 29th minute, hammering home from a corner, but the goal was ruled out for a foul on Schlager during the build-up. Spain kept pressing anyway.
The opener finally came in the 36th minute. Pedri carried the ball through midfield and slipped Cucurella clear down the left, and the full-back rolled a pass across the face of goal for Oyarzabal to sweep home from close range. Austria barely had time to reset before Spain nearly doubled the lead, Baena’s free kick cannoning off the crossbar in first-half stoppage time before Yamal’s follow-up was smothered by Schlager.
Here is the thing Austria actually created their best chance of the match seconds after halftime, when substitute Sasa Kalajdzic rose to meet a Marcel Sabitzer cross and somehow headed over from close range. It was the kind of miss that decides matches like this one. Spain made them pay for it.
Cucurella won the ball back himself in the 66th minute, found Baena, and the winger’s pull-back from the byline was met by an onrushing Porro for his first international goal. The Los Angeles crowd, buzzing since kickoff, settled into something closer to comfort. Yamal thought he had a third of his own soon after, only for David Alaba to hack the ball off the line.
Oyarzabal put the game fully out of reach in the 89th minute, taking Cucurella’s low ball into the box and slotting it into the bottom corner for his second of the night. Spain became the first European side to score twice in a World Cup knockout match since their own win over Switzerland in 1994, on the same July date, three decades apart.
Austria’s tournament ends the way their group stage nearly did, hanging by a thread until the final whistle removed any doubt. For Spain, this looked nothing like a team that has been eliminated on penalties in each of its last two World Cup knockout ties. Oyarzabal has scored more international goals than any European outside Erling Haaland since the start of last year, and on this night, that gap did all the talking.