Tunisia — Netherlands 1:3: Both Finished Well, One Had Chances

The Netherlands beat Tunisia 1:3 at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City on 25 June 2026, in a group game the Crime Index rates a routine 45%. The margin is easily explained — 71% possession and triple the chance quality. The detail worth keeping is stranger: both teams finished their chances at almost exactly the same red-hot rate. The difference was never the shooting; it was the supply line.

71% of the ball, 16 box shots: the Dutch production line

The visitors' control ran through every column: 647 passes to 258, with 602 completed against 199. Twenty attempts grew from it, and 16 arrived inside the box — an unusually pure concentration of shots in the zone that pays.

The model priced the evening's work at 1.85 xG. Three goals from that is a conversion of 1.62, comfortably above expectation, with 7 efforts on target keeping Tunisia's goalkeeper busy for all four of his saves.

Two teams converting at 1.6: the night's hidden symmetry

Tunisia's lone goal came from just 0.62 xG — a conversion of 1.61, statistically identical to the Dutch rate. Neither side wasted what it made; one side simply made three times more.

That symmetry is why 1:3 reads like a fair exchange rate rather than a story of finishing. Multiply each team's chance volume by the same hot touch and the scoreboard falls out automatically.

Tunisia's 10 shots, worth 0.62: activity without value

Only 4 of the hosts' 10 attempts came from inside the box; 6 were struck from distance, where the model pays pennies. Four found the target — decent accuracy applied to cheap positions.

Corners went 6 to 4 for the Dutch and offsides 2 to 1 against Tunisia, while fouls stayed level in spirit at 11 to 10. Nothing in the supporting numbers suggests the hosts were overrun physically; they were simply kept a postcode away from goal.

Five blocks by the losing defence

Tunisia's defenders smothered 5 Dutch attempts — against 1 block at the other end — which for a team with 29% of the ball is real, sustained defensive labour. Eight Netherlands efforts flew off target too, several of them under exactly that kind of pressure.

The structure of the Dutch attempts deserves its own line: with 16 of 20 shots taken inside the box, this was a side engineering probability rather than chasing moments. Teams with that shot profile barely need luck — their average chance is simply worth more, and over ninety minutes the arithmetic tends to collect. Tunisia's best football, meanwhile, happened without the ball: five blocks and a busy goalkeeper kept the margin respectable.

Both keepers closed at −0.06 Goals Prevented: par performances on unequal workloads. The cleanest summary is that every layer of this match agreed with every other layer — control became chances, chances became goals at the going rate, and 1:3 was simply the arithmetic settling.

A closer look at the box score

Possession split 29-71 in favour of Netherlands — a gap that barely shows up on the scoreline but shapes everything else in the report. On the passing numbers, Tunisia finished at 77.1% and Netherlands at 93.0% — the side dictating circulation wasn't necessarily the side creating the better chances.

The referee logged 11 fouls against Tunisia and 10 against Netherlands — a noticeable gap, though not one that maps cleanly onto pressing intensity alone. Offsides: 2 for Tunisia, 1 for Netherlands — a rough marker of how often either attack tried to time runs in behind.

Tunisia won 4 corners to Netherlands's 6; inside the box it was 4-16 in shot attempts, generally a better read on chance quality than the 6-4 split from distance.

The full match report for Tunisia vs Netherlands is available through the tournament's official statistics; the numbers above are its key parts.