World Cup: Coronation Complete! Lionel Messi Claims His Crown as Argentina Rejoices. (Published 2022) (2024)

Pinned

For Messi, and Argentina, the (extra) wait is worth it.

Only then did Messi’s wait, his agony, come to an end. Only then could he finally claim the one prize that had eluded him, the one honor he craved above all others, the one achievement that could further cement his status as the greatest player to have played the game: delivering a World Cup championship to Argentina, its third overall but first since 1986.

A wild, raw energy had swirled around Argentina throughout this tournament. It coursed through the streets of Doha, packed with tens of thousands of Argentine fans for the last month. It washed down from the stands during each of the country’s seven games here, a pulsating, urgent electricity.

The players detected it, too, their euphoria after every victory just a little more intense, just a little more desperate, the pressure of not only ending Argentina’s 36-year wait for a third World Cup but ensuring Messi’s career apotheosis driving them on and perhaps weighing them down in equal measure. The 35-year-old Messi had said this would be his last World Cup, his last chance to experience a joy that he and many of the fans had not felt in their lifetimes.

Everything Argentina did in Qatar was to an extreme. Its loss to Saudi Arabia plunged the team into despair. Each of its subsequent victories unleashed a fervent, unrestrained exhilaration.

Sunday night had teased deliverance. With only a little more than 10 minutes to play, Argentina stood on the cusp. Coach Lionel Scaloni’s team had shouldered the weight of history, the weight of expectation, admirably lightly.

Argentina had not so much as quieted Mbappé as silenced him. It had gone ahead, 1-0, in the 23rd minute, when Ángel Di María was fouled and Messi put in the penalty kick. Argentina flexed its muscle in the 36th minute with one of the most sumptuous goals the World Cup final has seen, a flowing move orchestrated by Alexis Mac Allister and finished by Di María but hinging on a pass that was a moment of characteristic Messi alchemy, a silken touch that turned the most base material into something golden.

For all that time, the 2-0 lead looked like smooth sailing; Argentina should have known it would not work like that. In the space of two minutes late in the second half, France wiped out Argentina’s advantage, all of its painstaking work crumbling in the blink of an eye: another penalty, this one converted by Mbappé in the 80th minute, followed almost immediately by a fierce volley, again by Mbappé.

Argentina’s players slumped, the breath drawn out of their lungs. They had been so close. In an instant it was 2-2; they were as far as ever.

France smelled blood; Argentina could do nothing but hang on for extra time. Messi roused himself again, driving the ball home in the 108th minute after goalkeeper Hugo Lloris made a save on Lautaro Martínez.

Once more, Messi was swamped by delirious teammates. Once more, he stood in front of Argentina’s fans, pumping his arms, an idol and his worshipers. And once more, Mbappé would not be denied, would not accept a cameo role in someone else’s story. His shot struck the outstretched arm of Argentina’s Gonzalo Montiel. Mbappé drilled home the penalty. The game would go the distance, to the sweet cruelty of penalties.

There, for once, it would not be Messi — or Mbappé — who delivered the decisive blow. They both scored. But no matter how teams try to manipulate the order, to direct destiny, penalty shootouts are, invariably, a place for unlikely heroes and unfortunate villains. Kingsley Coman and Aurélien Tchouaméni missed for France, leaving Montiel, an unheralded right back, standing with his country, and Messi’s legacy, on his shoulders.

The noise that Argentina’s fans emitted when the ball struck the net seemed to pierce the sky. Messi’s wait, at last, was over.

In the moments after he had arrived at what he has always seen as both his destiny and his duty, though, Messi seemed improbably, blissfully calm. As his teammates ran to one another, to the massed bank of Argentina’s fans behind the goal in which the final, crucial blow had been delivered, most of them could bear it no longer.

For most, all of that hope, all of that belief, all of that fear broke at once. Di María’s face was stained with tears, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. Messi, on the other hand, simply smiled, a brow briefly furrowing in a manner familiar to any harried parent as he tried to work out how his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, might bring their three children onto the field.

It was only when he embraced his mother a few minutes later that he could maintain his composure no longer, when he finally allowed his joy, his relief, to sweep him away. Messi might have learned long ago that it would not be easy to emulate Diego Maradona, to turn Argentina into a world champion; he could not, surely, have imagined it would be quite this hard.

Now it was done. He congratulated his teammates. He joined them, arms slung over their shoulders, as they danced and bounced with their fans. He found his family, clasped them tight.

And then he was summoned to the stage that had been erected in the middle of the field. FIFA likes to draw these things out; before the World Cup trophy is presented, it must run through the young player of the tournament, the top goalkeeper, the leading scorer, the best player. That final prize went, of course, to Messi. This World Cup was about him. It has always been about him.

He collected his best-player statue from Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president; shook hands with the assembled dignitaries; and walked off down the podium. The trophy he cared about was sitting there, golden and gleaming, in his sight.

There were a few minutes, yet, before he would have a medal placed around his neck, a ceremonial bisht draped over his shoulders, and the chance to hoist the trophy into the air. It was an hour or so before he would be carried around the field on his teammates’ shoulders, a vast crowd of staff members and partners and children in their wake, a homage to Maradona’s celebrations in 1986, the last time Argentina was champion of the world.

He still had all of that to come. He would have his moment, soon enough. But now he stopped next to the trophy. He looked at it. And then he leaned down, ever so slightly, caressed its smooth dome, and kissed it, once, twice. Messi had waited long enough. He did not want to wait any longer.

Argentina takes to the streets for a celebration three decades in the making.

“It is our pilgrimage,” said Elsa Diaz, 70, a handywoman draped in an Argentine flag, making the same walk she made in 1978 when Argentina won its first World Cup, but this time with her 32-year-old daughter. “We are all going to the Obelisk. It is our monument, and the center of Argentina.”

In a country where soccer is religion, this was among the holiest of Sundays. And so when Gonzalo Montiel’s penalty kick hit the back of the net — vanquishing France, ending a World Cup final for the ages and bringing the championship back to this soccer-obsessed country for the first time since 1986 — Argentina was plunged into a sort of rapture.

Strangers hugged. Friends kissed. Grown men wept. And everyone shrieked. “Argentina, mi amor!” one man yelled during extra time, tears streaming down his face. “Argentina, my love!”

“Emotion, joy — and a release,” said Federico Polo, 19, right after the victory.

Thousands had gathered in Centenario Park in western Buenos Aires to watch the game on a large screen set up by the city. After the match, everyone had the same idea: Head to the Obelisk.

But the roads were jammed, the metro was shut down and the city buses were parked. So they walked.

“The entirety of Argentina is on this avenue right now,” said Sergio Gutierrez, 46, a drugstore worker banging a drum, who walked with his wife and three children down Corrientes Avenue, a famed thoroughfare closely associated with the tango for the many theaters and dance halls that line the way. “We will walk until we can’t get any farther.”

The walk from the park would take 70 minutes, according to Google Maps, but the avenue was jammed, the pace was slow, and there were plenty of distractions along the way.

Every woman who looked to be of grandmother age was serenaded with a chant that has become a rallying cry of this year’s World Cup in Argentina: “Abuela, la, la, la, la, la.” The chant, of the Spanish word for grandmother, began in Buenos Aires after one of Argentina’s victories, when a group of young men sang it to a dancing older woman who wore a medical mask and wrapped herself in a flag.

“She still doesn’t know why everyone is singing to her but she loves it,” said Silvia Belvedere of her 89-year-old mother, Nelida Peralta, who was standing on the sidewalk along the procession, gripping a cane and waving two small Argentina flags. As the procession passed, each group that noticed her stopped to serenade her and take photos.

“I’m so happy,” Ms. Peralta said. “I can’t go there, so I’m staying here waving the flag.”

Farther down the avenue, a group of Bangladeshi immigrants were greeted warmly by the marching fans. Bangladesh’s love for Argentina’s national soccer team has become a major storyline here, and so Argentines parading down the route stopped for photos and high fives. One of the men from Bangladesh, who said he had lived in Buenos Aires for 24 years, said he had never felt more connected to his adopted home.

Along the route, Argentines expressed their joy with whatever was at hand. Cars stuck at intersections watching the procession beeped incessantly; one man banged a pan with a spoon. And over and over again, the crowd sang this year’s anthem of the Argentina national team, “Muchachos, Ahora Nos Volvimos A Ilusionar” — or “Guys, Now We’re Getting Excited Again.”

The song has become a sort of celebratory hymn in Argentina over the past several weeks, and it speaks of Argentina’s late soccer star, Diego Maradona, a sort of deity in this country, looking down from the sky to help Messi and his teammates bring Argentina another World Cup. After the song’s prediction came to fruition on Sunday, it was the soundtrack of the march.

As the Obelisk came into view, the crowd thickened. A city bus that had been abandoned in the middle of the street had more than a dozen revelers dancing atop it. Elsewhere, men hung from light poles, and people climbed to the roof of a restaurant via a ladder that created a sort of bridge between the restaurant and the top of a newsstand.

Some people had already been to the Obelisk and were heading the other way, their pilgrimage complete. A man with his face and chest painted blue and white looked drained. “My throat hurts from screaming,” said Pedro Humberto Aguilar, 51, behind blue-tinted shades.

The procession ended at Republic Plaza, a sea of celebration in every direction. Every avenue leading to the plaza was clogged with revelers. From above, the plaza was an expanse of humanity, hundreds of thousands of people, interspersed with waving flags and occasional fireworks.

Through the rapturous cacophony, the anthem could be made out here and there.

Over and over again, revelers belted out the lyrics, which try to convey Argentina’s intense love for its soccer team.

“I can’t explain it to you,” they sang, “because you won’t understand.”

Macarena Funes and Valeria Dorrego contributed reporting.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Qatar got the World Cup it wanted.

But on Sunday night, as the fireworks filled the sky above Lusail, as the Argentina fans sang and their star, Lionel Messi, beamed while clasping a trophy he had waited a lifetime to touch, everyone knew Qatar.

The spectacular denouement — a dream final pitting Argentina against France; a first World Cup title for Messi, the world’s best player; a pulsating match settled after six goals and a penalty shootout — made sure of that. And as if to make sure, to put the nation’s final imprint on the first World Cup in the Middle East, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, stopped a beaming Messi as he made his way to collect the biggest trophy in the sport and pulled him back. There was one more thing that needed to be done.

He pulled out a golden fringed bisht, the black cloak worn in the Gulf for special occasions, and wrapped it around Messi’s shoulders before handing over the 18-karat gold trophy.

The celebration ended a tumultuous decade for a tournament awarded in a bribery scandal; stained by claims of human rights abuses and the deaths and injuries suffered by the migrant workers hired to build Qatar’s $200 billion World Cup; and shadowed by controversial decisions on everything from alcohol to armbands.

Yet for one month Qatar has been the center of the world, pulling off a feat none of its neighbors in the Arab world had managed to achieve, one that at times had seemed unthinkable in the years since Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president, made the stunning announcement inside a Zurich conference hall on Dec. 2, 2010, that Qatar would host the 2022 World Cup.

It is improbable the sport will see such an unlikely host again soon. Qatar was perhaps among the most ill-suited hosts for a tournament of the scale of the World Cup, a country so lacking in stadiums and infrastructure and history that its bid was labeled “high risk” by FIFA’s own evaluators. But it took advantage of the one commodity it had in plentiful supply: money.

Backed by seemingly bottomless financial resources to fuel its ambitions, Qatar embarked on a project that required nothing less than the building, or rebuilding, of its entire country in service to a monthlong soccer tournament. Those billions were spent within its borders — seven new stadiums were constructed and other major infrastructure projects were completed at enormous financial and human cost. But when that was not enough, it spent lavishly outside its boundaries, too, acquiring sports teams and sports rights worth billions of dollars, and hiring sports stars and celebrities to support its cause.

And all that was on display Sunday. By the time the final game was played in the $1 billion Lusail Stadium, Qatar could not lose. The game was being shown across the Middle East on beIN Sports, a sports broadcasting behemoth set up in the aftermath of Qatar’s winning the World Cup hosting rights. It also could lay claim to the two best players on the field, Argentina’s Messi and the French star Kylian Mbappé, both of whom are under contract to the Qatar-owned French club Paris St.-Germain.

Mbappé, who had scored the first hat trick in a final in over a half-century, finished the game sitting on the grass, consoled by President Emmanuel Macron of France, an invited guest of the emir, as Argentina’s players danced in celebration all around him.

The competition delivered compelling — and sometimes troubling — story lines from the outset, with the intensely political opening at Al Bayt Stadium, an enormous venue designed to look like a Bedouin tent. That night, Qatar’s emir had sat side by side with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, less than three years after the latter had led a punishing blockade of Qatar.

For a month, deals were discussed and alliances were made. Qatar’s team was not a factor in its World Cup debut; it lost all three of its games, exiting the competition with the worst performance of any host in the competition’s history.

There would also be other challenges, some of Qatar’s own making, like a sudden prohibition on the sale of alcohol within the stadium perimeters only two days before that first game — a last-minute decision that left Budweiser, a longtime sponsor of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, to fume on the sideline.

On the tournament’s second day, FIFA crushed a campaign by a group of European teams to wear an armband to promote inclusivity, part of efforts promised to campaign groups and critics in their home countries, and then Qatar quashed efforts by Iranian fans to highlight ongoing protests in their country.

But on the field, the competition delivered. There were great goals and great games, stunning upsets and an abundance of surprising score lines that created new heroes, most notably in the Arab world.

First came Saudi Arabia, which can now lay claim to having beaten the World Cup champion in the group stage. Morocco, which had only once reached the knockout stage, became the first African team to advance to the semifinals, pulling off a succession of barely believable victories over European soccer heavyweights: Belgium, Spain and then Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal.

Those results sparked celebration across the Arab world and in a handful of major European capitals, while also providing a platform for fans in Qatar to promote the Palestinian cause, the one intrusion of politics that Qatari officials did nothing to discourage.

In the stands, the backdrop was a curious one, with several games appearing short of supporters and then mysteriously filling up in the minutes after kickoff, when gates were opened to grant spectators — many of them the South Asian migrants — entry free of charge. The true number of paying spectators is unlikely to ever be known, their empty seats filled by thousands of the same laborers and migrants who had built the stadium and the country, and who kept it running during the World Cup.

That group, largely drawn from countries like India, Bangladesh and Nepal, was the most visible face of Qatar to the estimated one million visitors who traveled to the tournament. They worked as volunteers at stadiums, served the food and manned the metro stations, buffed the marble floors and shined the hand rails and door knobs at the scores of newly built hotels and apartment complexes.

By the end of the tournament, most of those fans had gone, leaving the Argentines — an estimated temporary population of 40,000 — to provide the sonic backdrop to the final game. Dressed in sky blue and white stripes, they converged on the Lusail Stadium, creating the type of authentic World Cup atmosphere — bouncing and singing throughout 120 minutes of play, and then long afterward — that no amount of Qatari wealth could buy.

They had gotten exactly what they wanted from the World Cup. And so did Qatar.

For Kylian Mbappé, a hat trick is a bitter consolation prize.

The rest seemed to play out in fast motion. Lionel Messi of Argentina scored another goal in extra time to give his team the lead. Mbappé scored in response. When the tie could not be broken, Mbappé scored to open the penalty shootout. Messi followed and did the same. Then came two France misses, three Argentina makes and it was over.

That was how Mbappé found himself sitting on the grass near the midfield stripe wondering how it could have all gone so wrong, then so right, and then so painfully, so permanently wrong. It would take a moment to process that. The president would have to wait.

“Kylian has really left his mark on this final,” Mbappé’s coach, Didier Deschamps, said. “Unfortunately, he didn’t leave it in the way he would have liked. That’s why he was so disappointed at the end of the night.”

The story of Sunday’s World Cup final, arguably the best in the tournament’s history, was always going to be about Messi’s quest for the one title that had eluded him in his career. But Mbappé had come to Lusail with history and victory in his sights, too. He had his own story to write.

Mbappé had already experienced the feeling of winning the World Cup. In 2018, he and France lifted the trophy in Moscow, where Mbappé had become the first teenager since Pelé to score in the final. On Sunday, he was hoping to match Pelé again and make France the first country to retain the trophy since Pelé’s Brazil in 1962.

He had already done Pelé one better before the game went to penalty kicks: Not even the Brazilian great had ever scored a hat trick in a World Cup final. Mbappé’s was the first since 1966.

Mbappé, 23, will have known that. He is not just one of the world’s best players. He is also a student of the game and its history and its stars. For months he had been targeting Qatar as the moment, and the place, where he closed the gap with Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the debate over the best player in the game.

In an interview with The New York Times this summer, he was quick to recall the number of times each of his rivals had been named world player of the year. He knew he already had something on his résumé that they did not — a World Cup title — and he knew that a second in a row would be a feat even they could never match.

“I always say I dream about everything,” Mbappé said at the time. “I have no limits. So of course, like you say, it’s a new generation. And Ronaldo, Messi — you’re gonna stop. We have to find someone else, someone new.”

Mbappé thought that he was that someone else. His performance on Sunday made it seem more like a prediction than a boast: a penalty kick coolly dispatched in the 80th minute, after his teammate Randal Kolo Muani was knocked down from behind in the box; a second goal just over a minute later, a sliding right-footed finish after a give-and-go with Marcus Thuram at the top of the area; and a second penalty three minutes before the end of extra time, after Messi, for the second time, had given Argentina the lead and the momentum.

“They managed to get us back in the match, to keep the dream alive,” Deschamps said. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t achieve the dream.”

The penalties finished the game and the story. Mbappé eventually rose from the grass, lifted by a hand from Argentina’s goalkeeper, Emiliano Martínez, and eventually took a moment to share an embrace, and a few words, with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. But even his moment of personal triumph seemed cruel.

His three goals gave him eight for the tournament, edging Messi by one for the Golden Boot as the World Cup’s top scorer. But it also meant he had to walk onstage three times: first to collect the award, then to return to pose for photos and then a third time to receive his silver medal.

Each time, he made the long walk across the curling white stage. Each time, he passed the golden World Cup trophy. Each time, it was close enough to touch.

On Sunday, it was there for the taking. He will have to wait four years to get that close again.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

After spirits soared, the bars and streets of France fall silent.

Twice France rallied to tie the match, including in the 118th minute, before losing on penalty kicks. And by then rain was falling outside the once-boisterous bars, in keeping with the national sentiment. For the first time since the World Cup began, the streets did not echo with honking after a match and the grand, decorated Champs-Élysées did not throb shoulder-to-shoulder with revelers.

“It’s just terrible,” said Maximilien Bago, a 23-year-old business student, who moments before had been bouncing exuberantly in a wig-like hat matching the national colors. The eyes of the fans around him swelled with tears. “But that’s soccer,” he said.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, a soccer fan who was in Qatar to watch the match, waded onto the field to console Kylian Mbappé, the star forward who scored three goals, including two in quick succession that turned what looked like a rout for Argentina into one of the most dramatic matches in World Cup history.

“We were so close,” Mr. Macron told reporters, adding that the team had “made us incredibly proud.”

“We are a great soccer nation, we are also a great nation,” said the president. “What this game tells us is that nothing is ever a foregone conclusion.”

Many French cities had chosen not to put up screens or create fan zones, in protest of the environmental and ethical record of the tournament’s host, Qatar, even before the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine put France and the rest of Europe into power-saving mode.

Instead, many fans jammed into bars and friends’ apartments to watch the game.

“This match was eternal, exceptional, historic,” said Matthieu Couranjou, 52, a telecoms engineer at the French Culture Ministry who welcomed friends to his apartment in the Bastille neighborhood. Eruptions of joy after Mbappé’s third goal tied the match gave way to stunned silence after France lost in penalty kicks. “We went down fighting.”

In Grenoble, a large city in southern France, supporters with French flags draped over their shoulders and painted on their faces pressed against the windows of packed pubs to watch the game. Small fireworks were fired as people climbed trees, stood on tables or climbed on friends’ shoulders.

The mood of the crowd there — and across the country — ebbed and flowed with their team’s fortunes, from silence as France fell behind 2-0, to raucous cheers during their comeback, to silence again with a 3-2 deficit in extra time, to cheering again when Mbappé tied the match again. At last came deafening silence as France fell on penalty kicks.

“It’s too bad,” said 19-year-old Aurélien Delavay, who looked lost, his hands buried in his pockets, his face down. “We would have made history,” he added, referring to France’s chance to become the first team in a half-century to retain its World Cup title.

“But Argentina also deserved this victory,” he added. “Bravo to them.”

Reaching his teammates, finally, he hoists it in the air. The fireworks go off. And there they are: Lionel Messi and Argentina, 2022 World Cup champions.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Every one of them stops to touch, or kiss, the trophy on their way past it.

The dignitaries on the stage will include FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino; Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani; France’s president Emmanuel Macron; but NOT Argentina’s president Alberto Fernández: He decided it would be better to stay home.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

The temperature had gone from freezing on the streets to tropical inside the packed bars of Paris, with crazed French fans hopping up and down, hugging one another, pounding on the walls and bursting into the national anthem, time and time again. But by the end of the match, when France lost in penalty kicks, rain was falling in Paris to match the national sentiment.

“It’s just terrible,” said Maximilien Bago, a 23-year-old business student, pulling his hairy tri-colored hat off as the eyes of men and women around him swelled with tears. “But that’s soccer.”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Messi is absolutely beaming.

... and an entire nation exhales!

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT