Spain Prevails, World Cup Winners and Losers, and Damon Vs. Leo With Chris Ryan and Anthony Dabbundo

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**Bill Simmons** (1:06)
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The Bill Simmons Podcast, we are live on Netflix. Anthony Dabbundo is here, Chris Ryan is here. We are going to talk about the World Cup Final and a whole bunch of other things. Wanted to mention I have a new rewatch of us coming tomorrow night. We're doing Hitch.
One of the best rom-coms of the last 21 years, or at least one of the most successful. All right. I've been cooped up for a week and a half, fellas. I have a lot of sports thoughts. CR, go big picture for us as the soccer historian.
Spain, the second time they ever won. Messi falls short, comes damn close to winning two in a row. What was the biggest historical storyline for you?

**Chris Ryan** (2:53)
Yeah, I would probably say the best team won the tournament and the best team won the game. So they played like Kurt Goldsberry was just texting me. He was like, that was ethical football.
That's what it was. Those guys came to play the game, came to play the sport. Argentina tried to get into a street fight and the right team won.

**Bill Simmons** (3:12)
Dabbundo, what do you think?

**Anthony Dabbundo** (3:14)
I think that was actually one of the most dominant World Cup Finals of all time and it ended 1-0 and it took more time for them to actually find the goal than we thought it would. But you're going through the stats, going through the box score. I mean, they pitched a no hitter for 117 minutes Bill.
No shots. They only had one touch in the whole box of Spain, the 18 yard box, for an hour and five minutes. That is unbelievable. So yes, it took them a lot of score and we kept saying, well, they're hanging around, they're hanging around. But Argentina got their ass kicked.

**Bill Simmons** (3:50)
Well, the first half just felt like everybody was playing it safe, feeling out and it was like the worst of soccer. If you have all your casual soccer fans just coming in for this game who haven't watched any of the World Cup, they'll be like, oh yeah, this is why I don't watch soccer. This sucks.
Then in the second half, it became a resemblance of what we watched for the whole World Cup. Spain, phenomenal. Argentina, just turning into a cross between the Bad Boy Pistons, the OKC Thunder in the last couple of years, doing all their garbage stuff and somehow always getting a favorable whistle, CRY. What was happening with this?

**Chris Ryan** (4:28)
So what Argentina does is, God forbid, but this is also what some people accuse the Oklahoma City Thunder of doing, which is pushing the ref all the way to the limit where if you're not going to call everything a yellow, then nothing is going to be a yellow. Obviously, Enzo Fernandez went over that line at a certain point. But it's not an idiotic thing to do, to basically put all the pressure on the referee to be like, if you guys don't want me to ruin the match, I basically need to let you get away with a bunch of crap here. In this game, the thing with Argentina that was crazy was Leonardo Messi is the greatest player of all time and probably one of the two or three greatest athletes I've ever seen in any sport. But I actually think there was...