How Unai Simón became Spain's unsung World Cup hero with six clean sheets breaking a 96-year record
After a tough club season, Spain's goalkeeper has become the tournament's biggest surprise
Dubai: With France's Kylian Mbappé bearing down and the World Cup semi-final hanging in the balance, Unai Simón did what he has done all tournament: he made the problem disappear.
Racing off his line, he beat football's most electric forward to a loose ball, headed it clear, then somehow recovered in time to smother a rebound chance from Désiré Doué with a no-hands deflection at the edge of his own box.
As a non-sports writer these words would have made no sense to me, if I hadn't seen it all in action live last night as Spain won 2-0 over France on Tuesday, courtesy of goals from Mikel Oyarzabal and Pedro Porro, sending them into their first World Cup final since 2010.
But that single passage of play, twenty frantic seconds of a goalkeeper refusing to be beaten, said everything to me about how they got here.
A record six clean sheets
It was Simón's sixth clean sheet of the tournament, and with it, he rewrote the World Cup record books. No goalkeeper in the 96 year history of the competition had ever kept six shutouts in a single edition.
The previous mark of five had stood since 2010, shared by seven legendary names: Jan Jongbloed (Netherlands, 1974), Walter Zenga (Italy, 1990), Cláudio Taffarel (Brazil, 1994), Fabien Barthez (France, 1998), Oliver Kahn (Germany, 2002), Gianluigi Buffon (Italy, 2006) and Iker Casillas, the last man to lift the trophy for Spain, back in 2010. Simón has now gone one better than all of them.
The longest streak in World Cup history
The France clean sheet was not an isolated piece of magic either. Eight days earlier, at the same Dallas venue, Simón had denied Cristiano Ronaldo twice in a 1-0 win over Portugal, in what turned out to be the last World Cup match of the 41 year old's storied career.
That result extended a Spanish shutout streak that eventually stretched past 650 minutes without conceding a single goal, breaking a 36 year old record set by Italy's Walter Zenga at the 1990 World Cup.
Along the way, the run included a surprise scoreless draw against Cape Verde, hardly the platform anyone expected a World Cup record to be built on, and traces its roots back to a nervy penalty shootout exit to Morocco in 2022.
The weakest season of his career
What makes the run genuinely remarkable is how little of it looked likely going in. At club level this season, Simón endured one of the roughest campaigns of his career, as Athletic Bilbao slid to their lowest league finish in years, their goalkeeper conceding more than 50 goals along the way.
On paper, he was not even the best Spanish goalkeeper playing in Europe, let alone the best in the world. Arsenal and Barcelona fans spent much of the season arguing, loudly and often, that their own goalkeepers deserved the Spain shirt instead.
However De la Fuente’s faith in him held strong. True to his words he called Simon 'indisputable' in the team. He said "It would be unfair if we didn’t value Unai Simon’s quality, class, career, and professional experience. It would be absurd for me to have to come here and reaffirm it, just because he’s Unai Simon. When a goalkeeper is at this level, you have to respect his standing and his career."
And voila the moment the ball kicked off, so did the complaints as Simon proved his impregnable defensive abilities on the pitch.
Competition with David Raya
Arsenal's David Raya spent the season proving exactly that case. The 30 year old collected his third consecutive Premier League Golden Glove, becoming only the fourth goalkeeper ever to do it in a row, keeping 19 clean sheets as Arsenal won their first league title in over two decades and reached the Champions League final. Barcelona's Joan García was not far behind, keeping 15 clean sheets in a superb debut season for the Catalan club as they won LaLiga, and by some advanced metrics, actually outperformed both Raya and Simón in preventing goals altogether.
By the raw numbers, Spain coach Luis de la Fuente had two of the best goalkeepers on the planet sitting on his bench, and picked neither of them.
Even Raya, when asked about it, refused to turn it into a fight. "Spain is in very good hands no matter who gets to play," he said. "I think Unai Simon, since his debut, has raised the level of the goalkeeping position. We won the Nations League and the European Championship with him."
Even García, when asked directly who he considered the best goalkeeper in the world, pointed elsewhere entirely. "I like David Raya," he said. "He's having an incredible season in the Premier League. He's at a very high level and I'm really enjoying his season."
Between them, the three Spanish goalkeepers have made this the most talked about goalkeeping debate in world football all year, but only one of them is the one holding his gloves up after a World Cup semi-final.
A wall that held
It is a reminder that international tournaments do not always reward the season someone just had, that club form and international form do not always move together, and that sometimes a coach's stubbornness looks a lot like wisdom in hindsight.
Spain will face the winner of England and Argentina in Sunday's final in New Jersey, chasing only their second World Cup title, sixteen years after their first.
If they get there, it will likely be because the wall in front of their goal held one more time.
Whatever else this tournament is remembered for, Spain have spent the past month proving that defence wins trophies just as often as flair does, and that sometimes the most important player on the pitch is the one standing quietly at the back, waiting to be needed.
