The number of destiny: two goalkeepers, a 23, and the psychology of lucky numbers in sport

MetLife Stadium, New York, 19 July 2026. World Cup final: Spain-Argentina. In goal, on either side, two identical numbers: 23. Emiliano “Dibu” Martínez for Argentina, Unai Simón for Spain. A coincidence? Perhaps. But behind that number lie two very different stories — and sport psychology's take on superstition to explain them both.

Author Virginia Marino https://www.sportpsychologycenter.com

There's a moment when football stops being just football and becomes symbol. The 2026 World Cup final, at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, offered one of these moments — and it isn't Ferran Torres's goal in the 106th minute that gave Spain their second star, nor Emiliano Martínez's eleven extraordinary saves that forced the Spaniards into extra time. It's a detail many only noticed afterwards, looking at the official line-ups: both goalkeepers in the most anticipated final in decades wore the number 23 shirt.

Unai Simón #23 for Spain. Emiliano “Dibu” Martínez #23 for Argentina. Same number, two completely different stories, two radically opposite relationships with that digit. And a question worth asking: what does sport psychology tell us about this? Why does a number become sacred for an athlete? Why does superstition — even the kind we're aware of — keep working?

01 — 23: THE FACTS

The coincidence of the final

The match between Spain and Argentina is decided in the 106th minute, when Pedro Porro crosses from the right, Nico Williams flicks it on with his head, and Ferran Torres finishes first-time past Emiliano Martínez. It's the 1-0 that gives Spain their second World Cup title, fourteen years after their first in 2010. Argentina — down to ten men since the 93rd minute after Enzo Fernández's red card — had resisted with every resource available, including a goalkeeper who played the entire match with a fractured finger.

Emiliano Martínez's numbers are record-breaking: 11 saves in the final, the highest number ever recorded by a goalkeeper in a World Cup final in the competition's history. His Sofascore rating is 9.6. And yet the gold medal goes to the other goalkeeper, the one with the same number on his back: Unai Simón, named the tournament's best goalkeeper after a clean-sheet streak of 649 total minutes across the 2022 and 2026 World Cups — the longest in World Cup history.

Two extraordinary goalkeepers. Same final. Same number. The coincidence obviously carries no weight on the pitch's result. But it carries enormous psychological weight — because it opens a window onto something sport science has studied for decades: elite athletes' relationship with magical thinking, ritual, and numerical identity.

02 — TWO STORIES

A chosen number and an assigned number

The first thing to clarify is that the two goalkeepers didn't arrive at #23 the same way. Their stories with that number are opposite — and this opposition is, psychologically, the most interesting part of it all.

Emiliano Martínez has worn #23 since, at the 2021 Copa América, he was named to Argentina's squad as the back-up goalkeeper. Franco Armani was the starter and wore #1. Dibu was given 23. So far, no story. But that summer of 2021, something specific happened: Martínez became Argentina's starting goalkeeper, won the Copa América, and realised that #23 matched a significant date in his life — 23 June, his first son's birthday. In an interview for the Star+ platform, he explained it in these words: “El 23 es el día en que nació mi primer hijo, el 23 de junio” [23 is the day my first son was born, 23 June]. From then on, the number took on a meaning that went well beyond football. When he became the undisputed starter and could have claimed #1, he chose instead to keep 23 — and later carried it over to Aston Villa too, where he had previously worn #1: “Es el número con el que gané todo con Argentina. Soy muy supersticioso” [It's the number I won everything with Argentina wearing. I'm very superstitious].

Unai Simón's story is completely different. At Athletic Bilbao, his club, Simón wears #1 — the starting goalkeeper's number, the one that isn't up for discussion. For the Spanish national team, when he was first called up as a back-up goalkeeper, he was assigned #23. Tradition in major international tournaments reserves numbers 1, 13, and 23 for the team's three goalkeepers — and Simón came to wear 23 simply because there were other goalkeepers ahead of him in the pecking order. There's no public statement from Simón attributing personal meaning to 23. It's the number he was given, which he kept as he climbed the hierarchy, and with which he has won two major tournaments — Euro 2024 and now the 2026 World Cup.

Put differently: Dibu Martínez turned a coincidence into a deliberate, meaning-laden choice. Unai Simón accepted a coincidence that became identity. Two different paths to the same number — and two different relationships with superstition.

03 — PSYCHOLOGY

Why superstition works

The word “superstition” evokes something primitive and irrational. But sport psychology sees it in a far more nuanced way. Schippers and Van Lange's research on elite athletes — conducted through 197 interviews with top-level professionals — showed that eighty percent of the athletes interviewed adopt at least one superstitious ritual before competing. And that engagement in these rituals increases proportionally with the uncertainty and importance of the match. A World Cup final is the context of greatest uncertainty and importance that exists in football: it's exactly the moment when superstition peaks.

But why does it work? The mechanism was precisely identified by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler in a study published in Psychological Science: activating belief in something lucky — a lucky ball, a lucky charm, a number — improves subsequent performance through an effect on self-efficacy, that is, confidence in one's own abilities. Superstition doesn't change the objective conditions of the match. But it changes the athlete's subjective assessment of their own resources: “I have something special with me, I'm ready”. And it's that assessment, as Albert Bandura's decades of research have shown, that significantly determines the quality of performance. It should be noted that some replications of this study haven't uniformly confirmed the original findings: the relationship between superstition and performance is real but contextual, shaped by individual and situational factors. The general principle — superstition as an amplifier of self-efficacy — nonetheless remains one of the most solid in the literature on magical thinking.

In Dibu Martínez's case, the mechanism is transparent. #23 isn't just a number on a shirt: it's a condensed bundle of meaning. It contains his son's birthday, the victories with Argentina, the Copa América, the 2022 World Cup. Every time he wears that shirt, Martínez triggers an automatic association with everything he has already won wearing that number. It's an extremely powerful emotional anchor — and it works exactly like a lucky charm in the sense Damisch described: not because the number has magical properties, but because it evokes a mental state of confidence and mastery.

04 — MAGICAL THINKING

Why rational people believe the irrational

Dibu Martínez knows perfectly well that his son's birthday has no effect on a saved penalty or a cleared crossbar shot. And yet he keeps wearing 23. Why? This is the question Jane Risen explored in a landmark article published in Psychological Review: people can know that a belief is irrational and still choose to follow it.

Risen's model describes two cognitive systems: System 1, fast and intuitive, generates magical intuitions — “23 brings me luck”. System 2, slow and analytical, evaluates them and often recognises they're irrational. But instead of automatically correcting them, it can choose to acquiesce: accepting the intuition even while knowing it isn't logically true. This isn't a cognitive flaw — it's an adaptive strategy. If wearing #23 reduces anxiety and increases confidence, the cost of irrationality is amply offset by the psychological benefit. Dibu Martínez, interviewed by ESPN, puts it with disarming clarity: “Soy muy supersticioso”. He isn't claiming the number is magic. He's claiming he believes in it — and that believing does him good.

05 — NARRATIVE IDENTITY

When the number becomes part of who you are

There's another level of analysis concerning both goalkeepers, albeit differently: identity. Dan McAdams theorised that people build their sense of self through internally coherent life stories — narratives that integrate past, present, and future. Numbers, in this context, aren't mere digits: they can become chapters of that narrative.

For Dibu Martínez, #23 is a specific chapter: the chapter of rebirth. He had spent years as a back-up goalkeeper at Arsenal before breaking through at Aston Villa and then with Argentina. 23 is the number with which he stopped being second choice and started being first choice. It's the number with which he won the World Cup, saved decisive penalties, became one of the best goalkeepers in the world. Changing it would have been an act of narrative rupture — like rewriting a foundational chapter of his own story.

For Unai Simón, the path is the reverse but equally powerful. #23 was given to him when he was still a developing goalkeeper for the Spanish national team. But that number stayed with him as he grew, as he earned his place, as he became the best goalkeeper in Europe and the world. Simón's 23 doesn't tell of a pre-existing meaning: it tells of the construction of a meaning. It's the number with which he learned to be a champion — and wearing it into the World Cup final is the natural completion of that story.

06 — THE PARADOX

The 23 that wins and the 23 that saves

There's a beautiful, ironic paradox in the Madrid final. The goalkeeper who chose 23 with full awareness — Dibu Martínez, the self-declared superstitious one, the one who believes in it — lost the match despite delivering probably the best individual performance of his life. The goalkeeper who received 23 without seeking it — Unai Simón, for whom the number is simply a federation assignment — won the World Cup and the Best Goalkeeper award.

This tells us something important about superstition. It doesn't work as a guarantee: Damisch herself, in her study, specified that superstition doesn't determine who wins, because “the other side might be stronger”. Superstition works as a psychological amplifier: it brings the athlete closer to their maximum potential. Dibu Martínez played the best match of his career wearing #23. The fact that it wasn't enough to win doesn't invalidate the psychology — it merely confirms that the opponent was Spain.

And there's one last reflection worth making. Dibu's 23 is intentional, superstitious, emotionally loaded. Simón's 23 is random, adopted, turned into habit. And yet both produced extraordinary performances in the most important final in the world. This suggests that the underlying psychological mechanism — the number as identity anchor and ritual — works regardless of the direction from which it's built. It doesn't matter whether meaning precedes the number or the number creates the meaning. What matters is that, in the end, a coherent story exists between the athlete and their digit. And that story, in the mind of a goalkeeper waiting for a penalty kick or an opponent's header in extra time of a World Cup final, is worth more than any other certainty.

07 — CLOSING THOUGHTS

What athletes' 23 teaches us

The coincidence of the two #23s in the 2026 World Cup final obviously isn't causally significant. It wasn't the number that determined Martínez's eleven saves or Simón's 649 minutes without conceding. But it's a rare opportunity to observe, on the same stage and in the same role, two different psychologies of superstition at work — and to understand what they have in common.

What they have in common is this: both goalkeepers built, over time, a system of meaning that includes their number. One started from meaning (his son, 23 June) and let victories confirm it. The other started from victories and let them build the meaning. In both cases, the result is the same: a number that is no longer just a number, but an anchor — something that, at the moment of maximum pressure, brings the athlete back to a mental state of confidence and control. And in a World Cup final, where the difference between winning and losing is measured in centimetres and fractions of a second, that anchor can make the difference.

Sport psychology doesn't ask athletes to stop being superstitious. It asks them to understand why they are — and to use that understanding to build rituals that actually work, that are sustainable over the long term, and that hold up even when the magic isn't enough and the opponent wins anyway. As Dibu Martínez showed: you can play the best match of your life and still lose. And even then, the number on the back of your shirt remains the right one.

SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES

1. Damisch, L., Stoberock, B., & Mussweiler, T. (2010). Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance. Psychological Science, 21(7), 1014–1020. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610372631 [Note: some replications of this study have shown non-uniform results; the self-efficacy mechanism as mediator remains the most robust contribution of the research]
2. Risen, J. L. (2016). Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions. Psychological Review, 123(2), 182–207. DOI: 10.1037/rev0000017 http://chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/rev-0000017.pdf
3. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.
4. McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
5. Schippers, M. C., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2006). The psychological benefits of superstitious rituals in top sport: A study among top sportspersons. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36(10), 2532–2553. DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-9029.2006.00116.x

News sources: Goal.com Italia (official Spain-Argentina line-ups, 19 July 2026), Sky Sport, Fanpage.it, Corriere dello Sport, Olympics.com, Today.it, Sofascore.com, Virgilio Sport, Il Fatto Quotidiano (19 July 2026). Final result: Spain 1-0 Argentina a.e.t., Ferran Torres 106', MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey. Emiliano Martínez: 11 saves (absolute record in a World Cup final), Sofascore rating 9.6, Man of the Match. Unai Simón: tournament's best goalkeeper, 649 minutes unbeaten between 2022 and 2026 (world record). Origin of Emiliano Martínez's #23: Star+ interview “En Primera Persona” (cited by ESPN Deportes, “El 23 es el día en que nació mi primer hijo, el 23 de junio”) and ESPN Deportes statement on the number transfer to Aston Villa. Origin of Unai Simón's #23: federation assignment confirmed by UEFA.com (official profile, “International number: 23”) and Tuttomercatoweb (official communication on Spain's World Cup 2026 squad numbers). Dibu Martínez's statement on his fractured finger: Vietnam.vn, citing original pre-match sources.