I admit so far Italy have been slightly better of the two teams in this tournament. However, we saw against Austria that they do sometimes struggle in scoring - even versus a lot worse teams than Spain. After 90 minutes the score was 0-0 and after thirty minutes of extra time Italy advanced with a 2-1 final score. I have mentioned before what and advantage playing at home is and both teams made the most of this advantage in the group phase.. Now the match is played at Wembley Stadium in London so neither teams has an advantage in that sector.

Italy will be missing perhaps their most important player Leonardo Spinazzola. In my opinion he has been even a top-3 player in the whole tournament! Italy will surely by hurt be missing the amazing offensive talent Spinazzola would have brought to this match.. Now they will be have to face Spain without one of their key offensive variations. Spinazzola is replaced by Emerson who is a very good player too of course but a lot more defensive and hardly ever takes part in attacking. I am not quite sure if the betting market fully realizes the importance of Spinazzola. Missing Spinazzola will lower the expected goals number for this match even further and under 2.5 total goals is a lot more probable than over 2.5 goals and the probability of draw increases.

Spain have not fully convinced me in this tournament but still they have created most expected goals of all teams and have wasted quite a lot of very good promising scoring chances. We knew already before the tournament they do not have a World-class striker. However, they still have a big number of high-quality offensive players who are able to score. Of course versus a the solid Italian defense they will not have the luxury of over ten or even more scoring chances and have to be more effective than for example versus Sweden and Poland. Both of these matches were a draw despite huge Spanish dominance.

To sum up, I simply believe Spain have potential for better performance both in defense and offense than they have shown so far whereas I see Italy do not have much room for improvement. This is the most important rationale for this pick the second most important rationale is missing Spinazzola. I don't see a favorite in this match at all so the value is on Spain +0.5 goals option.