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“We’re the villains, there to stop the goals that football lives off,” Unai Simón says. If so, there has never been a bad guy as bad as him, the keeper who could do with an introduction from Don LaFontaine: In a World Cup dominated by forwards, one man resists … There were five minutes to go until half-time during Spain’s battle with Portugal in the last 16 when something historic happened, or there would have been if anything had actually happened. Instead, nothing did, which is the way Simón likes it.

As the clock rolled into the 40th minute, Spain’s goalkeeper silently moved on to 560 World Cup minutes without conceding, taking in seven games and going all the way back to Ao Tanaka’s strike for Japan in Qatar. Against Austria in the last 32, he had already left Walter Zenga behind on 517, now he and Spain overtook Switzerland’s record: 559 minutes spread across 14 years and three tournaments in 1994, 2006 and 2010. The next minute, Nuno Mendes hit the bar, but still Simón would not be beaten, Mikel Merino’s 90th minute winner the only goal of the game.

Not so long ago, Simón admitted that he had once wondered whether it was all worth it. Playing in goal, he says, can be a bit “thankless”. The front pages are for others. The good ones are, anyway: the “noise” was his. All year, he has been at the centre of the debate. How could he not be when Athletic Club were struggling and those competing with him are David Raya, the best goalkeeper in the Premier League, and Joan García, the best in La Liga? “Sod it, I’ll say it: we have the best goalkeepers at the World Cup,” Simón insisted a few days ago.

For Luis de la Fuente, though, it was never a debate, however insistent the noise got. He had coached Simón all the way through the youth teams, winning it all: the under-19 and under-21 Euros, Olympic silver, the Nations League, Euro 2024. They were practically family and now look: now Spain feel like Spain again and Simón has made history. No other country has ever reached the sixth game of a men’s World Cup without conceding.

There, on Friday in Los Angeles, Spain face Belgium in the quarter-final. “They’re very clearly favourites,” Thibaut Courtois said as a million microphones were thrust into his face under the stand at the LA Galaxy’s training base in Carson. “The first thing we have to do, is score.” So far, no one has. So far, they have barely even been able to take a meaningful shot at the European champions. There were just 15 in the group stage, only three on target. Austria didn’t muster one on target.

Against Cape Verde, Spain allowed just 0.3 xG. Against Saudi Arabia it was 0.14, against Uruguay 0.2 and against Austria 0.32. “Against Portugal we’ll face more shots. Hopefully not, but I’m sure we will,” Simón said. He was right, and Roberto Martínez made much of his satisfaction at causing Spain the kind of problems that no one else had, but it still wasn’t much more: 10 shots, only two on target and an xG of 0.58. Simón made two saves, taking his tournament total to six. Of the keepers left in the World Cup, only Emiliano Martínez has made fewer saves and he has let in four goalsin the last two games alone.

“The important thing for a goalkeeper, something I place a lot of importance upon and that Unai defines very well too, is the ability to prevent rather than save,” says García, Simón’s understudy. “Stop them getting to you: coming out for a high ball, covering defensively, intercepting low crosses. Those things might not get reflected in the stats but they’re vital for a goalkeeper. That’s key: prevent the chance coming in the first place. That’s been a key in this World Cup for us.”

It also of course speaks to something deeper. If Simón is the bad guy, he is not alone. What is the collective noun for villains? A selección? “The record says more about the team than it does about me,” Simón insists. He is not the only one who has played every minute: so have Marc Cucurella and Pau Cubarsí. Aymeric Laporte has sat out just one minute. In front of them Rodri, who started slowly but has been outstanding in the last two matches, has missed only three.

Cubarsí in particular has been superb. For all the talk of Lamine Yamal, the kid who eclipses all else, it is the other teenager at the other end that has most impressed. Born in tiny Estanyol, a village with a population of around 200, the son of a carpenter who ran a family business going back four generations, Cubarsí is the second youngest man ever to make his debut for Spain. Lamine Yamal is the first. The day Cubarsí made his Barcelona debut, he and Lamine Yamal were younger than Robert Lewandowski put together.

There was something about him that was different from the start. “When I watch him, my heart rate doesn’t change,” Barcelona’s then-coach Xavi Hernández said. De la Fuente had given him his Spain debut and although he decided not to take him to the Euros, judging it a little soon, that calmness is clear here. “It doesn’t seem like he’s 19, the way he takes on responsibility is enviable,” Simón says. Cubarsí has completed 96% of his 449 passes, and not just sideways: 34 of his 71 against Portugal went into the opposition’s half. There were 19 recoveries, 23 defensive actions completed. Only Paolo Maldini reached as many clean sheets so fast.

“Pau and Aymeric are a luxury: they fit the idea we have, they bring the ball out, they filter passes, and they have presence: they’re very complete,” De la Fuente says. “A footballer is not just a footballer because of his quality; there are 1,000 other elements too. Technically you can be very good but [young players] wouldn’t be as good if they didn’t have an emotional control of the situation; that’s what truly makes the difference, what means a 19-year-old plays like he’s spent a lifetime there. And we know the importance of having someone near to give you serenity in key moments when you could lose it. There’s a magnificent balance between them. Between all four [defenders].”

All 11, in fact. “We all attack and we all defend,” Dani Olmo says. If García admits that Spain’s structure is not as risky as Barcelona’s, this too starts at the front, an idea shared. And it’s certainly not defensive in the traditional sense: against Austria, the full-backs, Cucurella and Pedro Porro, scored one and set up two between them.

Tougher tests will come, it is true, but it’s not just that Spain’s opponents have not got to Simón’s goal often; it is that they have rarely got anywhere near it. “Spain are very aggressive in the press,” Courtois warned.

“It’s about denying their defenders time, not letting them think, making sure when they have to make decisions they do it under pressure,” Mikel Oyarzabal, the striker, insists. Merino adds: “If you can keep a clean sheet, it’s a guarantee that a good result is coming.”

In 2010 on the way to winning the World Cup Spain didn’t concede any in the knockout phase; Iker Casillas clocked up four consecutive games without letting in a goal, setting another record that Simón, the villain of this piece, has left behind.