World Cup 2026, Quarter-Finals: Spain Beat Belgium to Reach the Semifinals — and Mikel Merino Wins It Off the Bench Again

Mikel Merino did not start. He almost never does anymore, at a tournament that keeps handing him the last word. Spain are into the semifinals of the World Cup because of him — because of a substitute who walks on when the game has stopped making sense and finishes what the men who began it could not.

La Roja beat Belgium 2-1 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, and the scoreline flatters neither the quality of the football nor the drama of how it arrived. Spain were the better side for long stretches and never quite the dominant one. They created, they hesitated, they let Belgium back into a match they had controlled, and then — as they did in the round before — they found the answer on the bench rather than on the drawing board. Merino has now scored the decisive goal in two consecutive knockout ties. That is not a coincidence anymore. It is a trait.

The opening goal was the version of Spain everyone came to see. Lamine Yamal, who spent the night cutting inside from the right whenever he pleased, worked the channel and rolled it back for Dani Olmo. Thibaut Courtois pushed Olmo’s shot away, but the rebound sat up in the six-yard box and Fabián Ruiz was quickest to it, half a step ahead of everyone, and buried it. Thirty minutes gone, and the game looked like it might obey the odds everyone had recited before kick-off.

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Belgium had other ideas, and less to lose. Rudi García’s side had walked into Los Angeles as underdogs — “everyone expects Spain to beat us,” the coach had said, and he meant it as a challenge, not a complaint — and they answered the goal before the interval. A ball swung in from the flank, and Charles De Ketelaere climbed to meet it and glanced a header inside the post, past a goalkeeper who could only watch it drop. One apiece, and a quarter-final that had felt scripted was suddenly a fight.

What Belgium could not do was hold their own together. They had lost their captain, Youri Tielemans, to an injury in the warm-up — a cruel way to lose a leader before a ball is kicked. Then, in the second half, they lost Courtois too, the one man on the pitch whose brilliance could paper over the fatigue in front of him. On came Senne Lammens, young and cold and thrown into the loudest afternoon of his life, and it was into that gap that Spain finally stepped.

The winner was scrappy in the way that decisive goals so often are. Pau Cubarsí, a centre-half with license to carry the ball, drove forward and struck it from distance — not unstoppable, but heavy and awkward and rising. Lammens got hands to it and could not hold it, and the ball squirmed loose into exactly the wrong place. Merino was there. Of course he was there. He does not score the goals that make highlight reels for their technique; he scores the ones that come from reading, three seconds early, where a game is about to break. He put it away, and Spain had their semifinal.

It would be easy to file this under the fine margins of tournament football and move on, and Luis de la Fuente will not object if you do. But the pattern that has followed Spain since the group stage was on the pitch again in Inglewood, and it is worth naming. This is a team with more talent than shape — Yamal a menace, Pedri and Ruiz clean and quick through midfield, and yet a side that stalls when the first idea is closed off and waits for a moment rather than manufacturing one. Cape Verde exposed that flaw weeks ago. Belgium, a golden generation running on memory and one elite goalkeeper, came within a spilled save of exposing it again.

For Belgium, this is the end, and it has the weight of an era ending with it. De Bruyne, Lukaku, the names that have promised a World Cup for a decade and never delivered one — they leave a tournament they were never quite equipped to win, beaten by a better team on a day two injuries stripped away what little margin they had. They went out swinging, which is more than some of the favourites managed. It will not feel like much consolation in the tunnel.

Spain move on to the last four, and the draw has been unkind in the way it is meant to be at this stage: France are waiting. Les Bleus dispatched Morocco earlier in the round without ever appearing to break stride, a machine humming along at three-quarter throttle, and they will arrive in Arlington as the sharper, more settled side. Spain will arrive as the team that keeps finding a way — flat for an hour, then decisive in the instant it matters, carried by a substitute who has made a habit of arriving late.

De la Fuente would surely prefer to win these games in the ninetieth minute of good football rather than the eighty-something of a goalkeeper’s mistake. But semifinals are not handed out for style, and Spain have theirs. Merino, the man who keeps walking on with the game already written and then rewriting the ending, has seen to that.

Tags: wc26, Spain, Belgium, World Cup 2026, Spain national football team, Belgium national football team

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