The journey took him from Gelsenkirchen to Kansas City. It began as an 18-year-old and reached a new level as a 38-year-old. Argentina’s youngest World Cup scorer is also their oldest. He is also, inimitably, Lionel Messi.
Messi’s first World Cup ended in a game in which Miroslav Klose scored one of his 16 World Cup goals; Messi was an unused substitute when Germany knocked out Argentina in 2006. Perhaps revenge came two decades on. Messi drew level with Klose at the top of the all-time standings with his treble against Algeria.
Klose had resigned himself to his fate, anyway. Messi will go past him, Kylian Mbappe surely, too. “The record will be broken eventually,” the German said last week. “Messi is welcome to do it. I’m a huge Messi fan, always have been.”
Klose is a huge overachiever, a footballer who did not find the net in the Bundesliga until he was 22 and yet who overhauled the Brazilian Ronaldo to become the most prolific World Cup goalscorer of all. He was not touted for greatness at an early age. Messi was, but if that greatness manifested itself largely in the colours of Barcelona, it may have come later in life in the albiceleste of Argentina.
Go through his record-equalling haul in World Cups and 10 have come as a footballing pensioner. That can be explained in part by the reality that the 2022 tournament was a winter World Cup. Messi opened his World Cup account against Serbia and Montenegro at Schalke’s ground. Yet, when he turned 35, he was level on World Cup goals with, among others, Asamoah Gyan, Helmut Haller, Erich Probst, Oleg Salenko and Josef Hugi.
An argument about the greatest players ever was already raging, but Diego Maradona’s status as Argentina’s finest was unchallenged. Maradona remains his country’s finest in World Cups, if only because no one in the modern era has come closer to winning the competition almost single-handedly, but Messi has emulated him in one respect – as a captain who lifted the trophy – and surpassed him with his statistical feats.
There is a sense in which Messi has addressed some of the criticisms directed at him; a way, too, in which the dynamic in his career has been flipped. Messi may have been a Barcelona footballer who played for Argentina. Now he is an Argentina footballer who also plays for Inter Miami.
His sinecure in Major League Soccer may have meant that many of those who used to tune in to watch him on a regular basis now rarely see him in action between World Cups. Yet there was a seamless continuity, as though the last three and a half years had not happened.