2025 World Championships – Water Polo
- July 11-24, 2025
- OSBC Aquatic Centre, Singapore Sports Hub, Singapore
- Tournament Central
- 2024 Olympic Champions: Spain (women), Serbia (men)
- 2024 World Champions: United States (women), Croatia (men)
- 2025 World Cup Champions: Greece (women), Spain (men)
In a tale of two thrilling men’s water polo semifinal matches, we now have our two finalists for the gold medal match: #2 Spain and #3 Hungary. Their losing opponents, Serbia and Greece, will face off for the bronze medal.
Spain and Greece’s match was a repeat of the 2025 World Cup final, where Spain took gold and Greece took silver. Spain started off on a good foot, edging out Greece 6-3 in the first half. During the second half, however, Spain only scored one more point to Greece’s four, tying up the game 7-7. Consequentially, penalty shootouts started, which the Spaniards got the best of. After shootouts, the score was 11-9 in Spain’s favor. For the second game in a row, 24-year-old Bernat Sanahuja emerged as Spain’s top scorer and player of the match.
Hungary and Serbia had just as close of a game as Spain and Greece did, though there’s did not go into penalty shootouts. This game was a roller coaster. Hungary got a sizeable lead in the first quarter, but Serbia closed it by halftime. The Hungarians then jumped ahead in the second quarter to a four-point lead. In 3x Olympic Champion fashion, Serbia pulled off a near-miraculous comeback in the fourth quarter, but they fell one short. Hungary advanced to the finals 19-18. Akos Nagy won player of the match, but it was Serbia’s Dusan Mandic who scored the most points of the game, accounting for six of his country’s goals.
Spain and Hungary will face off July 24th at 9:35 A.M. EST for the gold medal. Both teams are undefeated in Singapore, but Spain has slightly more momentum from other competitions as the reigning World Cup champions and European champions. Notably, Hungary is in the gold medal match for both men’s and women’s water polo. Spain and Greece also had both genders make it to the semifinals.
The bronze medal match kicks off at 5:35 A.M. EST on the same day. Also on July 24 are the classification matches for #5-6 (Montenegro vs Croatia) and #7-8 (Italy vs United States).
