European champion Spain faces the Netherlands for football's 2010 World Cup title Sunday at Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The match will feature the Netherlands high-powered attacking style against Spain's ball possession strategy. The Dutch side has scored five more goals than Spain during the tournament, while the Spaniards have specialized in controlling the ball in low-scoring matches.
The final will showcase two of the leading scorers of the World Cup, David Villa of Spain and the Netherlands' Wesley Sneijder. They each have five goals at the tournament and are tied with Uruguay's Diego Forlan and Thomas Mueller of Germany. Forlan and Mueller's tournaments ended Saturday as Germany defeated Uruguay, 3-2, in the third place game.
One thing is certain: it will be the first time a European team has won the World Cup when the tournament was played outside of Europe.
Meanwhile, football's world governing body has predicted a global television audience of more than 700 million for Sunday's World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands.
Niclas Ericson, the director of FIFA's TV division, told reporters that he believes the audience will be bigger than the 2006 World Cup final in Germany that was watched by 700-million people around the world.
FIFA has estimated a cumulative audience of around 26-billion watched the 64 matches at the 2006 tournament. Ericson says this is the first time any event has placed broadcasts in virtually every territory. He says the figures would go even higher if viewers on the Internet and mobile phones were included.
Audiences have increased over previous years. The number of viewers in the United States jumped 50 percent over the 2006 World Cup, while in Germany, the semifinal loss to Spain garnered a market share of 90 percent.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
