Lionel Messi v Kylian Mbappe & Argentina v France: Getting suitably hyped for the World Cup final – The Warm-Up

SUNDAY’S BIG STORIES

Oh Hey, It’s A World Cup Final

Big day? Big day. Even the Warm-Up, bitter and jaded and thoroughly middle-aged, felt a little shiver this morning. There’s a World Cup final today. Haven’t been able to say that since 2019, when the USA and the Netherlands went at it in Lyon. And for the men it’s been more than four years, which is not appropriate behaviour.

And we don’t mean any disrespect to either Netherlands’ women’s team or Croatia’s men, when we say that this won feels a little more finely balanced. Both the USA and France went into those finals as strong favourites, and the odds were borne out. Indeed – and now we mean no disrespect to France – the last men’s final was a bit, well, silly. Six goals! In a World Cup final! Like something out of the 1950s.

This one though. Obviously it’s not impossible that we’ll get another bizarre multi-goal pile-up – neither defence fills anybody with confidence. But here in the early morning it feels like it’s going to be a tight one. It’s too big not to be a tight one. This game is balanced on a knife edge, which is itself balanced on another knife edge, and that on another. One slip and you’re coleslaw.

To give you a sense of what a France win might mean, we need only to note that the last men’s team to successfully defend the World Cup was Brazil in 1962. And even that great flood of players, anchored around Pelé, had to let England have a go in 1966 and come back refreshed in 1970.

It is difficult to win this thing once. Pelé has won it three times; twenty men have won it twice, most of them Brazilians from 1958 and 1962 or Italians from 1934 and 1938. Ronaldo and Cafu both got medals in 1994 and 2002, albeit Ronaldo didn’t play in the USA, and Daniel Passarella is the only Argentine with a winner’s medal from 1978 and 1986.

There are 10 Frenchmen standing ready to join this exclusive club, a number lessened significantly by injury. And that, perhaps, is what a France win would represent: an assertion not just of a great generation of players but a terrifyingly deep one. Brazil’s line-ups for the ’58 and ’62 finals were only three players different. Compared to 2018, France have more than a half a new squad and will likely start with more than half a new team.

As for Argentina, we’ll get onto the main man in a little bit, but thinking about the team in general: it’s been a while. We can’t recall a tournament since their last win when they haven’t been in the conversation, at least to begin with; but always, somehow, never to end with. They were supposed to be the best team in the world in 2002, and that went miserably. They’ve had one of the best players in the world every year since 2010 – or maybe 2006? why didn’t José Pékerman bring little Leo on? – and that’s gone variously miserably. If years of hurt wasn’t such an English way of looking at the world, we’d suggest that 36 of them is quite a lot.

But then, that’s the nature of the World Cup. Whatever happens will feel big, will come with the heft of history behind it, and will echo on into the history yet to come. A month of football has led to this point, but so has four and a half years of football, and 36 years, and for both teams more than a century. Everything, everything, everything comes together here.

The Messi Question

We’ve looked at the players that have won this thing twice, but the list of men that have lost two finals is even more exclusive. As far as we can tell, it consists of eight Dutchmen that played in both the 1974 and 1978 finals, along with five West Germans that played in 1982 and 1986 (along with Pierre Littbarski, who started in ’82 and was an unused substitute in ’86).

To this list we may soon be able to add Lionel Messi, who was player of the tournament in 2014 even as Argentina lost to Germany. He might get player of the tournament today, and lose again. (Ángel Di María was in the squad in 2014 but didn’t get on the pitch for the final; that might also be about to happen again.)

Winning or not winning a World Cup final probably doesn’t make difference, in the long run, to the clearheaded estimation of how good a footballer was. It’s a single game. Even the most narrative-addled among us have to admit that one game is quite a small sample size, at the mercy of variance, of luck, and of the opposition turning up and simply being a better team.

But while saying that Messi doesn’t need a World Cup to be considered a great, or even the greatest, is undoubtedly true, that doesn’t change the fact that today’s result, whatever it is, will loom large over whatever comes next. Perhaps that might not be true if he’d never really cared about international football, about winning this particular trophy among all the rest, but that simply doesn’t apply. He cares. He cares so much that he’s shouting at Wout Weghorst.

Win today, and his story acquires the one thing it’s missing: a successful mission of redemption. If there’s a problem with Messi’s career, in terms of the shape of it, it’s that he got too good too quickly; he was given Barcelona’s no.10 shirt at the age of 21, won his first treble that season, and picked up his first Ballon d’Or later that year. Lose today, and however we choose to weigh that vast pile of silverware, it will always come with an ellipsis, a question mark, an unresolved chord. This game today may not determine his place in the pantheon, right there at the very top, but it cannot help but flavour the story of how he got all the way up there.

(Those two-time losers, then, and we do stand to be corrected: Jan Jongbloed, Ruud Krol, Wim Jansen, Johan Neeskens, Arie Haan, René van de Kerkhof, Johnny Rep, Rob Rensenbrink; Harald Schumacher, Karlheinz Forster, Hans-Peter Breigel, Felix Magath, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, and Littbarski.)

One More Shot At Making Them Whole Again

Say what you like about Gareth Southgate, but he’s unfailingly polite. A ruder, more self-involved managed would have made an announcement about his future straight after the loss to France, and in the process would have denied his nation the chance to get some real discourse going. But not Southgate. If England can’t win the World Cup, then the next best thing is having a big old conversation about the manager; he’s given his people what they want.

Presumably there are other factors at play: thinking this team genuinely has what it takes to mix it with the best; wanting to spend more time with Jude Bellingham; really appreciating Marks and Spencers’ tailoring. All good motives, as is the fact that there really isn’t an obvious replacement. Still, as the nastiness that followed that loss against Hungary showed, even the most apparently popular England manager is living under an uneasy truce. This was a chance for Southgate to get out before the job ate him alive. Maybe he’ll get another, and maybe he won’t.

IN OTHER NEWS

RETRO CORNER

HAT TIP

“Comments such as ‘he’s found his inner Diego’ or ‘he’s been possessed by Maradona’ were commonplace in the Argentinian and international press alike. This perception was triggered by a series of seemingly out-of-character reactions by Messi during and after that match. He lashed out at the referee, lost his cool and insulted the Dutch striker Wout Weghorst during his post-match interview: ‘What you looking at silly? Go away.'”

We’re betting that Maradona would have said something a little spicier than “silly”. And Mora y Araujo’s sense is that “Messi is very much not becoming Maradona; what we are seeing is Messi becoming himself. More and more comfortable in his own skin, more assertive in his own unique personality, more comfortable in his own style of leadership.”

As she tells it, “I first met him in 2009, a one-to-one interview for a UNICEF book about players and their childhoods. Messi was polite, reserved, and only livened up after a number of questions. Noticeably, when talking about what a sore loser he is – he hates losing at everything, card games, dice. Anything. Back then he told me that for a long time when he was a young boy he didn’t realise how good he was at football, because he secretly suspected his older brothers and their mates purposely let him win – to avoid his tantrums if he lost.”

COMING UP

Andi Thomas will be back tomorrow to make a final call on Messi: Fraud or Not Fraud?