Two Point One Seven Expected Goals. Zero to Show for It. Turkiye Are Out 2026
Thirty-two shots. One goal. That is the shot count Turkiye produced against Paraguay, and it sits next to a final score that says they lost. Paraguay beat Turkiye 1-0 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on June 20, 2026, in their Group D match at the World Cup, eliminating the dark horses with a game still to play. Turkiye finished with 2.17 expected goals to Paraguay’s 0.32. Almost any other night, that gap wins the match by three or four goals. This is the night it lost one.
Here is the direct answer. Matias Galarza opened the scoring for Paraguay inside the first two minutes, finishing a low effort from 20 yards after a flick-on from Julio Enciso. Paraguay then played the final 47 minutes of the first half and the entire second half a man short, after Miguel Almiron was sent off in first-half stoppage time for covering his mouth while speaking to Mert Muldur, a decision confirmed by VAR. Turkiye never found an equalizer despite the extra man, and the 1-0 scoreline holds until full time.
Truth is, the possession and shot numbers barely belong in the same match report as the result. Turkiye finished with 78 percent possession, 629 passes at 89 percent accuracy, and 50 touches inside the Paraguay box. Paraguay, with ten men for most of the game, managed 22 percent possession and just 96 completed passes at 54 percent. Every surface-level metric says dominance. The scoreboard says otherwise.
Strip away the possession numbers and look at where Turkiye’s chances actually came from. Of their 32 shots, only five hit the target, and the quality on most of them was poor. Substitute Deniz Gul had the best look of the second half in the 89th minute, a chance worth 0.44 expected goals from eight yards out, and put it straight at a blocking defender. Can Uzun forced a save from the same passage of play seconds earlier. Merih Demiral, a center back, finished the match with four shot attempts of his own, including a stoppage-time header that drifted inches past the post. When your central defender is taking more pot shots than your strikers are converting, something in the final ball is broken.
Orlando Gill made five saves on five shots faced, a perfect night defensively for the Paraguay goalkeeper, including a stop on Abdulkerim Bardakci’s looping effort in the 74th minute that he somehow tipped over the bar while back-pedaling. Gill’s goals-prevented figure landed at 0.67 above expectation, meaning he singlehandedly turned more than half a goal’s worth of Turkiye pressure into nothing. Compare that to Ugurcan Cakir at the other end, who faced just seven shots and still conceded once, his goals-prevented figure sitting at minus 0.79. One goalkeeper outperformed the chances in front of him. The other did not.
Mert Muldur’s 33rd-minute header rattling the crossbar and post before bouncing clear is the kind of moment that decides whether this match gets remembered as a near-miss or a complete collapse. Had that gone in, the whole shape of the night changes. It did not, and Turkiye spent the rest of the match chasing a goal that their underlying numbers said should have arrived five or six times over.
Paraguay committed 15 fouls to Turkiye’s 14, numbers close enough to suggest this was not simply a case of ten men parking a bus and fouling their way through it. Andres Cubas led Paraguay’s midfield resistance with 18 defensive interventions on his own, a figure that explains plenty about how a short-handed side absorbed waves of pressure without conceding twice. Turkiye’s front players, by contrast, kept finding space and kept failing to use it.
The first-half stoppage time red card changed everything about how this match needed to be read. Before Almiron’s dismissal, Paraguay were leading 1-0 against a full-strength Turkiye and competing roughly evenly for spells. After it, Paraguay effectively played 47 minutes of football protecting a lead with a numerical disadvantage, and somehow conceded fewer clear chances in stoppage time than they did in the run of regular play. That is not accidental. That is a team set up with real defensive discipline, even shorthanded.
Turkiye’s elimination leaves them facing a dead rubber against the United States, who sit top of Group D on six points after two wins. Paraguay move to three points and control their own path into the round of 32 with a result against the Americans still to come. Make no mistake, the shot count from this game will follow Turkiye into every postmortem written about their tournament, a number that looks less like bad luck the longer you stare at it and more like a finishing problem that has now ended a World Cup campaign.
So here is the question nobody in Santa Clara wants to answer plainly: if a team can generate 2.17 expected goals and 32 shots against ten men and still lose, is that misfortune, or is that simply what happens to teams that cannot find a way to convert control into goals when it matters most?