There is a version of this story that ends in New Jersey on July 19, with Ferran Torres wheeling away in the second period of extra time and Lionel Messi standing with his hands on his hips, watching Spain do to Argentina in a final what Argentina spent a decade failing to do to anyone. That version treats the 1-0 defeat as confirmation, the last data point in a career-long argument that Messi, for all his genius, was never quite built for the shirt. It is a tidy story. It is also missing twenty years of context that make it wrong.
To understand what actually happened this summer, you have to go back further than most of the commentary bothered to. Messi’s relationship with the Argentina jersey was, for the better part of a decade, treated by his own country as an open wound rather than a source of pride. He lost a Copa America final to Brazil in 2007 as a supporting act, barely out of his teens. He lost the 2014 World Cup final to Germany in extra time, the closest he had come and the furthest it seemed he might ever get. He lost the 2015 Copa America final to Chile on penalties.
Then, one year later, in the same country where he would eventually lift a very different trophy a decade on, he stepped up to take Argentina’s first penalty in the Copa America Centenario final, also against Chile, and put it over the bar. He fell to his knees at the centre circle and pressed his forehead into the grass. Afterwards, he told reporters, plainly, that he thought the national team was over for him.
It is worth sitting with how total that collapse was. This was not a player being criticised for one bad night. Sergio Aguero, his closest friend in the squad, said he had never seen Messi so broken in a dressing room. The team’s own conditioning coach later described finding him sobbing after the final whistle. Argentine radio and back pages spent years running the same question: how could the best player alive not carry a shirt his own country had worn to two World Cups a generation earlier?
The comparison to Diego Maradona, who dragged a far more limited Argentina side to the 1986 title more or less by force of will, hung over every one of Messi’s near misses like a verdict already written. He came back from that retirement two months later, quietly, saying only that he wanted to help from within. Nobody was promising a happy ending at that point. There wasn’t one in sight.
If anything, it got worse before it got better. Russia 2018 remains the low point of Messi’s international career, and it deserves to be named as such rather than skipped over on the way to the good part. Argentina drew their opener with World Cup debutants Iceland after Messi missed a penalty, then were dismantled 3-0 by Croatia in a performance so chaotic that coach Jorge Sampaoli publicly took the blame for the tactics. Maradona himself, watching from the stands with a cigar, told Venezuelan television that Sampaoli would not be welcome home if he kept picking a team that badly.
Argentina scraped through the group on a late Marcos Rojo winner against Nigeria, then were eliminated in the last 16 by France, 4-3, in a game that felt less like a defeat than a diagnosis. Sampaoli was sacked. Messi, Aguero, Javier Mascherano and Gonzalo Higuain all effectively closed the books on that era of the national team in the same tournament.
What Argentina did next was not a plan. It was a shrug that happened to work. With Diego Simeone, Marcelo Gallardo and Mauricio Pochettino all turning the job down, the federation reached into Sampaoli’s own backroom staff and handed the caretaker role to Lionel Scaloni, 40, a former under-17 coach with no senior head-coaching experience at any level. Maradona, unimpressed, said the man could not even direct traffic, let alone a national team. It was meant to last a handful of friendlies. Rodrigo De Paul later admitted the players themselves did not trust the new setup at first. Nobody in Argentine football would have called this the beginning of anything.
It took three more years to become one. In 2021, at the Maracanã, of all places, against Brazil, of all opponents, Argentina finally won something with Messi wearing the armband: a Copa América that ended a 28-year drought and, more than any statistic, changed the emotional register of everything that followed. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was the sequel nobody thought this story got to have: a final against France that went to penalties after finishing 3-3, and one of the great individual tournaments in the competition’s history, Messi finishing as both top performer and, finally, champion.
Argentina added the 2024 Copa America on top of it. By the time this year’s World Cup began, Messi was not an unfulfilled genius carrying the weight of a nation’s disappointment. He was a two-time continental champion and a world champion, 39 years old, playing in a sixth World Cup that nobody, least of all him, had guaranteed would happen. And Scaloni, the coach nobody wanted, had become the most successful manager Argentine football has produced this century.
None of that has made the doubt disappear entirely, and a fair account of this summer has to admit as much. Argentina’s run to the final was not universally admired even before it ended; a petition demanding the team be thrown out of the tournament over its physical style and a string of contested refereeing decisions gathered more than twenty million signatures, and when Spain finally won, Germany’s Toni Kroos, who had beaten Argentina to a title himself in 2014, posted two words that instantly became the tournament’s epitaph. The implication was not subtle: that the team built around an ageing Messi had been out-fought and out-argued as much as it had been outplayed. That criticism deserves a hearing, not dismissal. Some of it landed.
But it is a different criticism than the one Argentina spent 2014 to 2016 aiming at Messi himself, and conflating the two erases the part of the story that actually changed. Argentina reached three World Cup finals in the last four editions, a stretch matched by few sides in the tournament’s history, built largely around a player who, by his own admission, could no longer cover the ground he once did. Scaloni’s solution was not a workaround for a declining star.
It was intelligent design: stack the midfield with runners like De Paul and Leandro Paredes, ask Messi to conserve himself for the ninety seconds that actually decide these games, and trust that those ninety seconds would keep coming. They did, right up until they ran into a Spain side that conceded a single goal across the whole tournament and a teenager in Lamine Yamal who looked, over ninety minutes plus thirty more, like the closing of one era and the opening of another. Losing to that is not the same story as the boy who missed the penalty in 2016. It is not even close.
Messi’s own reaction told you as much. He skipped the mixed zone that night, and when he finally spoke a day later, it was not the language of a man settling old scores with himself. “The pain is immense,” he wrote, before turning, as he nearly always does now, to what the run itself had meant to a country that had once turned on him for less. That instinct, gratitude before self-pity, is itself the measure of how far this relationship travelled. The Messi who missed that penalty in 2016 might not have written those words. He had not yet been given a reason to believe the story would turn.
None of this settles the eternal argument about Messi against Maradona and Pele, and it should not try to. What it should settle is smaller and more specific: that a final lost by a point of expected goals to the best defensive side in the tournament, at the end of a run that included two continental titles and a World Cup this decade alone, is not evidence that Messi failed his country. It is evidence of the opposite that he spent the back half of his career closing an account Argentine football had assumed, for years, would simply stay open. Whatever comes next for him at the international level, and Scaloni himself says that decision belongs to Messi alone, the ledger no longer reads the way it did in 2016. It reads the way very few careers, in any sport, ever get the chance to.
Read more – Messi: Is There Anything Left to Prove?
Also see – Record Breaker, History Maker: There Is Simply Nobody Like Messi
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