I think that's a fair list of why people ended up rooting for Spain by the end. The Falklands banner was obviously controversial, and while for my country that is nothing new and a lot of us felt incredibly represented by and proud of our players for that banner. At the same time, I completely understand why people outside Argentina saw it differently, and the final got pretty heated, so I get why those things turned people off.

Where I disagree is that I don't think it tells the whole story. A lot of the anti-Argentina sentiment was already there before most of those later controversies happened. The VAR stat sounds bad on paper, but I don't think it's evidence by itself that Argentina was being favored. It tells us there were no VAR interventions against them, not necessarily why that happened.

As for the final, I also think part of the reaction came from the contrast. Spain had one of the calmest tournaments of any team, while Argentina had one of the most emotional. If you watched a lot of the knockout games, plenty of teams got into physical, heated matches, it wasn't like Argentina were the only ones playing with that intensity. Spain just happened to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, so the difference stood out a lot more.

So yeah, I get why a lot of neutrals preferred Spain, but I think people sometimes compress a tournament full of nuanced incidents into "Argentina were dirty and FIFA carried them." A lot of the "VARgentina" and "FIFA princess" comments were already widespread before many of the controversies happened, which makes me think people were already predisposed to see every close call through that lens. What honestly got to me wasn't that people wanted Spain to win. That's completely normal in football. It was seeing football arguments turn into sweeping statements about an entire country and its people. That's where, personally, I felt the discussion stopped being about the tournament.