Who will win the prize today in Soccer City stadium?

Spain has the talent and depth, along with masterly passing skills, and never holds on to the ball too long.

The Netherlands always has hope when Arjen Robben and Wesley Sneijder are within shooting distance.

And whether the fireworks at the end are in Dutch orange or Spanish red, the result will be a first in the 80-year history of the World Cup: neither nation has ever won it, despite their being steeped in the sport.

More than that, each team has sought to place the imprint of its style on soccer. For as long as anyone can remember, Spain has believed that to love the game is to love the ball. The Spanish lineup, more than half of it from the Barcelona school, follows that belief to excess, and to excellence.

The Dutch players at this tournament tell themselves, and tell us, that they still have faith in the Total Football of the Johan Cruyff era. But they tell themselves that winning comes before expression and that, if need be, they are prepared to grind out a victory.

The Dutch Oranje have lost two finals — to West Germany in 1974 and to Argentina in 1978. Both were on the home turf of the opponent, and both had elements of the Dutch belief that their talents would prevail no matter what.

This new Dutch bloom, unbeaten in the last 25 games and with a perfect record at this World Cup, has been urged by its coach, Bert van Marwijk, to earn the victory and only then to marvel at the achievement. It is a basic maxim, but the Netherlands has yet to follow it through to the end of any World Cup.

There is no Cruyff in the lineup today, and this Dutch team’s style is somewhat less expansive the Total Football style, in which every player could pop up at any position at any moment.

But if it is more structured, more tough-minded than in the 1970s, can the tactical Dutch gain sufficient ball possession from the talented Spanish? That, as Germany found in its loss on Wednesday, is the hardest part of playing against Spain.

Xavi is capable of spinning a pass a minute, with four out of five of them uncannily accurate. His teammates — Andres Iniesta, Sergio Busquets, and Pedro, if he plays — know exactly what Xavi’s range is and where to run.

They have done it a thousand times in training. They were reared on it, and reared alongside one another from childhood in the Barcelona youth academy.

“You can see it in every pass,’’ Joachim Loew, the defeated Germany coach, said Wednesday. “How Spain plays is how Barcelona plays. They can hardly be beaten. They are extremely confident and very calm in the way they circulate the ball.’’

It is a little bit more than Barcelona. Real Madrid supplies the goalie, Iker Casillas, the cavalier right back Sergio Ramos, and the extra midfield man, again a pass master, Xabi Alonso.

This time, Spain does have at both ends players who are winners. Carles Puyol does not say a lot, but he has won almost every major soccer trophy as Barcelona’s captain. David Villa has the cold-eyed look of an Old West sharpshooter, and before the semifinal he had scored five of Spain’s six World Cup goals.

What he was missing, and what Spain still hopes for, is a goal from his natural hunting partner, Fernando Torres. Spain’s coach, Vicente del Bosque, has tried to give Torres time on the field to recapture the cutting edge he possessed before surgery on his knee three months ago.

Without that double act, Spain’s possession has dazzled, but it has produced barely a goal a game. The scorers for the Dutch side, Robben and Sneijder, are anything but conventional strikers. Robben raids from the right wing and fires his shots with stunning left-footed velocity. Sneijder emerges from midfield, where he runs from penalty area to penalty area, shooting when opponents least expect it. Both have surprised themselves by heading goals despite neither standing much above 5 feet 10 inches.

It is in the timing, in the instinct and the hunger of exceptional players. Luiz Felipe Scolari, the coach of Brazil’s 2002 World Cup winning team, considers Sneijder to be the outstanding player in this tournament. Less outstanding, possibly, but as important to how the Dutch will play this final, are Mark van Bommel and Nigel de Jong. They are the ball winners, the players who must stop the Spanish from building rhythm.

And van Bommel is especially hard-natured, so much so that it has seemed remarkable that he has not been red-carded for some of his tackles, his body checks and his tendency to tell the referees how to do their job. The arbiter today is another surprise in this endlessly surprising World Cup. He is the Englishman Howard Webb, and there is precedent for Webb’s showing leniency toward van Bommel’s roughing up of talented Spanish players.

But Spain can win. It has lost only two of its last 53 games, and apart from the team it lines up at the start, it has a bench brimming with talent — Cesc Fabregas, David Silva, either Torres or Pedro — that could start for most teams. Puyol, a defender, scored the goal that got Spain to its first World Cup final, and any one of his team’s fine substitutes could be summoned to score the defining goal in its history.