Destiny calls in New Jersey - will it be Messi's final miracle or Spain's new dynasty?
Fans celebrate Argentina's victory over England in the 2026 FIFA World Cup semi-final football match at the Obelisk in Buenos Aires. Pic: Luis ROBAYO / AFP via Getty Images
Gianni Infantino promised the world 104 Super Bowls this summer. On Sunday afternoon, in the armpit of America, FIFA’s president will do his damnedest to deliver at least one.
A World Cup Final which crept up on us is one for the ages, the meeting of the champions of Europe and South America with enough dreams and narratives to fill even the giant grey basin of doom which rises out of the swamplands of New Jersey. Before they get to fulfilling those dreams, they will first have to do what every one of the previous 103 games had to: fight for football’s soul.
After a US national anthem (why?) sung by Jennifer Hudson there will be a pre-game show featuring Post Malone, Tom Cruise and influencer IShowSpeed (again, why?). Then we’ll have two quarters of action before a Halftime Show of Justin Bieber, Madonna (why?), Shakira, BTS and, apparently, The Muppets. Thirty minutes later, the game will resume with two more quarters. Come one and all, drink from the Gianni Bowl.
The last hands to touch the World Cup before either Lionel Messi or Rodri get theirs on it will be Donald Trump and Infantino’s. Their fingerprints have been all over a tournament which has torn at the moral fibres of the game — the Folarin Balogun scandal a nadir unlike any other — over the past five weeks and all the weeks which preceded the cup’s journey to this unsettling part of the world. The heart of darkness indeed.
But football has somehow defied their attempts to drag it down with them. While Infantino gathers his sycophants in Manhattan on Saturday to do a final tally on an expected $10 billion in revenue, it is the untold, unquantifiable riches served up on the field which matter so much more. The montage makers will remind us of some of them in a Viking row-Cape Verde joy-Iranian defiance-American (and English) infamy-crying Ronaldo-Azteca aura-Vini Jr-Mbappe-Kane-Haaland mash-up before the broadcasts finally fade out.
They’ll have left the last 15 or 20 seconds free. That’s for Argentina. Or for Spain. Both really, but one will feature more than other because that’s how winners are remembered.
What Lionel Messi has done over these wild weeks will never be forgotten, win or lose. At 39 and having already done it all, he has conjured more magic, new wonder. Flying north from Atlanta on Thursday morning with a plane full of his countrymen, Messi’s face was on their shirts and flags, badly illustrated on one man’s calf, surely tattooed on other body parts too. Most of all he was deep in their hearts, having helped kill off another English odyssey.
That image of him bathing an infant Lamine Yamal was already doing numbers by Thursday morning and has only done more since. Because it’s the way of the world now, new viewers immediately assume the picture is AI because how could it possibly be that 19 years on they will line up opposite one another in a World Cup Final? Like so many things around Messi, it is easier to see and believe than to reach for sense.
But we must at least try to make sense of the battle to come. ‘Unbeatables v untouchables?’ went one headline in The Guardian on Friday morning and that does a pretty snappy job of it.
Luis de la Fuente’s irresistible Roja have gone 37 games without losing in normal or extra time. From pillar to post they have been the tournament’s most complete team, so clear in their system of possession, pressure and precision in everything they do. Against France on Tuesday it clicked in a way it hadn’t before. Rodri, Fabian Ruiz and Dani Olmo were simply immense. The defence has been miserly in the extreme. Mikel Oyarzabal is a quiet killer at the other end. All in all, they have undoubtedly improved since their Euro 2024 triumph.
It feels like if it was far too much for Kylian Mbappe and France then it should be too much for Argentina too. But maybe the Albiceleste are this World Cup’s best team and it just gets lost in the emotional psychodrama which occurs every time they take the field.
Argentina’s march to glory would be unprecedented. No team has ever won eight matches at a single World Cup because no team ever could. But only one had ever racked up seven wins in a single tournament before — the brilliant Brazilian team of 2002. The next most prolific weren’t a bad outfit either, the Brazil of 1970, who won six of six on their march into the pantheon.
Time and again in recent weeks, Lionel Scaloni’s boys of 2026 have dragged themselves out of utter peril to keep their winning run intact. The despair which hung in Atlanta Stadium when Egypt went 2-0 up with less than 20 minutes to go was deep and true. Yet it would appear that when the panic should set in, Argentina find their focus. Racking up over two and a half goals a game — 18 goals in seven games in total — they have played their best football when they’ve gone behind or been stunned by an equaliser.
Cristian Romero has been a shithousing rock at the back. Is there anything more Spursy than the fact that the two form defenders on either side coming into this final were part of the backline that almost got relegated? Other Argentines have played their part too, but simply everything hinges on their captain.
That, of course, was the case in Qatar too and there Messi found a way to navigate his side past an inspired Mbappe. Yamal hasn’t come close to hitting the heights which either Messi or Mbappe have but the beauty of a final is that it shapes all of the narratives, all of the history. This would be a hell of a time for the 19-year-old who was once that infant in Messi’s hands to now take the World Cup out of them.
The man who took the photo of the two, Joan Monfort, described it this week as “a true miracle of destiny”. In New Jersy, destiny now calls. Maybe Messi has one last miracle in him.
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