Brazil generated 19 shots and 1.69 xG; Japan managed 5 shots and 0.23. A 2:1 scoreline barely hints at how one-sided the underlying game was.
On the evidence sheet, Japan authored the better chance volume: 1.98 xG to Sweden’s 1.62. That is not a landslide, but it is a real edge — a 0.36 xG advantage, or roughly 22% more expected scoring value than Sweden produced. Yet the scoreboard settled on 1:1, which is football’s favorite way of laundering inefficiency into “a fair result.”