Spain Won the World Cup With Frosted Tips

After watching over a month’s worth of football matches, we finally have a 2026 FIFA World Cup winner: Spain. The Spanish national team bested Argentina 1-0 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and if you’ve been following the tournament closely, you’ll have noticed a prevailing hairstyle trend of frosted tips abound on the field. (With honorable mention of Erling Haaland-style man buns.) It was on full display Sunday as the champions took the podium to accept their trophies and three star players showed off their longer dip-dyed blond locks.Right winger Lamine Yamal kept his curls short over a burst fade, with a few of the strands dyed in a light yellow hue. Left winger Nico Willams had a high fade with dip-dyed dreadlocks, which were tied up for the match. And defender Marc Cucurella had shoulder-length curls with his ends colored in an orangey yellow.The 2026 World Cup featured a number of players from various countries with frosted tips, and as the competition dwindled, those wearing the hairstyle—like Curaçao’s Tahith Chong, Canada’s Derek Cornelius, and Tunisia’s Hannibal Mejbri—became fewer and fewer, leaving its last three stalwarts—Yamal,Williams, and Cucurella—to carry the torch. (It wasn’t unlike many of the World Cup players wearing striking pink cleats throughout the tourney.) Though the hairstyle was once famous for its heyday in the late-90s and early aughts, international players throughout the tournament wrote a new playbook for how to pull the style off.“On curls, coils, and textured hair, lightened tips emphasize shape and movement differently than they do on straight hair, giving the trend a distinctly modern, global feel rather than evoking a single early-2000s archetype,” celebrity hairstylist TerraRose Puncerelli told GQ last month.The revival of such a drastic hairstyle also draws attention to a roster of athletes that viewers may not already be familiar with, Puncerelli explains. “It helps build a personal brand that extends beyond the game.”That said, Yamal, Williams, and Cucurella, have already established their places in the soccer history books. Prior to the championship game, UNICEF revealed on X that Lionel Messi had met a baby Yamal and his mother during a fundraising photoshoot, nearly 20 years before the two were set to face off for the 2026 championship title. Since that fateful linkup, the 19-year-old right winger has become one of the most impressive football players in the world.Cucurella made news during the finals match when Argentina’s captain Lionel Messi made a desperate attempt to get the defender ejected for briefly grazing his own mouth during a conversation on the field—a futile undertaking that left a bad taste in fans’ mouths.And it was Williams’ headbutt that teed up Ferran Torres’ winning goal for the Spanish national team. Who are we to say whether his frosted tips didn’t play a role in that legendary assist?