Football and many other ball games are moving to a direction where having universal players in the team - who are good or at least fair both in defense and in attack - are getting more and more important. You can not any more afford to have players who are 100% in defense and 20% in offense or vica versa, you better have a lot of 60%-60% players.
The GER-ARG game was a clear example for that. IMHO individually none of the German players would score more than 80% on an absolute theoretical scale of football skills, but they ran an incredible amount and left practically no place for ARG to play.
Khedira took off Messi, (while Mascherano took off Özil for the sake of completeness), and Messi, Tevez and Higuain could not do a thing between 6-7 german players and helped nothing in the defense during the whole game, Di Maria and Rodriguez would have needed more help from Demichelis, (Lahm played a lot better than Demichelis).
Schweinsteiger, Müller and Podolski are way more universal players than Di Maria, Rodriguez or Messi.
I have to add though that GER were pretty much on the positive side of the variance on Saturday
I mean Podolski did not show anything special during the whole WC so far, Lahm, Schweinsteiger and Müller are good players, but both played at the very edge of their abilities on Saturday, while Özil was weak on the last few games and there are at least 50 better forwards on the world than Klose, but he happens to play in the German team. Also preparational and tactical difference between the coaches were cruical. Maradone brought Palermo while left out two of the world's best defensive players, etc.
BTW. I watched the game in Germany on Saturday and you can not imagine how Germans stood out as a nation for their team before, during and after the game. Congrats to Germany and their supporters.