Spain did not merely win the 2026 World Cup. They won the tournament, then stayed to collect almost everything else.
Four of the five major individual awards went to Spanish players. The one that didn’t went to the man who finished as the sport’s greatest World Cup scorer of all time. And the greatest player who ever lived left New Jersey with silver.
Here is every award from the night the MetLife ceremony wrapped the biggest World Cup in history.
Golden Ball: Rodri (Spain)
In a tournament of stars, the best player was not a striker. He was the man who made sure the strikers never had to panic.
Rodri controlled every match Spain played with an economy of movement that made the most complicated football look inevitable. His passing range, positional intelligence and defensive reading anchored a midfield that suffocated France, Belgium, Morocco, England’s semi-final challenge against them vicariously, and ultimately Argentina in the final. Spain conceded once in eight matches. That one goal was not through the middle.
He received the award ahead of Messi (Silver Ball) and Mbappé (Bronze Ball), an outcome that split opinion slightly but holds up under scrutiny: Spain were the best team, and Rodri was the reason their machine never jammed.
Golden Boot: Kylian Mbappé (France) — 10 goals
The Golden Boot now carries a footnote the sport will debate for decades: Mbappé’s two goals in the third-place bronze match took him to 22 World Cup career goals, breaking Lionel Messi’s mark of 20. He became the men’s all-time leader in World Cup scoring — and he is 27, with potentially two or three more World Cups ahead of him.
His tournament haul of 10 goals from eight matches is the highest at a single World Cup since Ronaldo Nazário’s eight in 2002, and it came despite France’s campaign ending one match short of the final. He won the award at consecutive tournaments for the first time in history.
The full 2026 Golden Boot table: Mbappé 10, Messi 8, Bellingham 7, Haaland 7, Kane 6, Dembélé 6.
Golden Glove: Unai Simón (Spain)
The goalkeeper question at most World Cups is: who is the best among the options? At 2026 it was barely a question. Unai Simón conceded one goal in Spain’s seven outfield matches, set a new World Cup record of 650 consecutive minutes without conceding, and kept clean sheets against France, Belgium and Argentina across the knockout rounds. The Bilbao goalkeeper has played his way from Spain’s third-choice option three years ago to the best goalkeeper at the world’s biggest tournament.
Best Young Player: Pau Cubarsí (Spain)
The award for the tournament’s best player aged 21 or under went to the Barcelona defender who is 17. Not 21. Seventeen years old, starting every knockout match for the world champions, tackling Mbappé and Messi as though that were a Tuesday morning activity.
Cubarsí’s emergence is one of the tournament’s great stories: he arrived without a senior international cap to his name barely eighteen months ago, and he leaves with a World Cup winner’s medal, the Best Young Player trophy, and a central defensive partnership with Aymeric Laporte that conceded once across eight matches. The next twelve years of Spanish football are in careful hands.
FIFA Fair Play Award: Netherlands
Perhaps the tournament’s most surprised recipients, given the Netherlands were knocked out in the round of 32 by Morocco on penalties. The award recognises the overall disciplinary record across all six of their matches, and their squad’s conduct throughout the tournament. A small consolation for a campaign that ended just short of where their fans believed it could go.
Silver Ball and Silver Boot: Lionel Messi
The Silver Ball and Silver Boot speak to how close the greatest player in history came to adding a second World Cup to his 2022 crown. Eight goals, a group stage for the ages, three consecutive knockout rescue acts, and then a final in which Spain’s organisation and Fernández’s red card left him holding silver instead.
No one who watched Atlanta and the semi-final week will call those silvers a diminishment. The sport simply ran out of superlatives for a 39-year-old who arrived carrying an entire nation’s impossible expectations and left with the tournament’s second-best individual record. Some losses leave a mark. Some carry dignity in every centimetre. Messi’s second-place finish belongs in the second category.
The awards table, complete:
- Gold Ball: Rodri (Spain)
- Gold Boot: Mbappé (France, 10 goals)
- Golden Glove: Unai Simón (Spain)
- Best Young Player: Pau Cubarsí (Spain)
- Fair Play: Netherlands
- Silver Ball: Messi (Argentina)
- Silver Boot: Messi (Argentina, 8 goals)