He has been everywhere at this World Cup. In the VIP boxes, yes, but also on every screen, every break, every segue, and the long commercial hours between games. Sometimes, he’s making coffee on a Nespresso machine; then he’s flipping pancakes for Ninja Flex Flame; showering in a black Boss underwear, one appreciative shot of his butt included; then, driving to McDonald’s, drinking Pepsi, munching on Lay’s, and lacing up Adidas trainers. Sometimes he even walks you through the aisles of Home Depot, and counsels you on the loan options at the Bank of America. He’s almost working as hard at this World Cup as a French midfielder.

Beckham has chosen this illustration of him as football’s high-society import to showbiz. That’s his life these days, World Cup or not. He has a honey brand, appears in documentaries about his life, hobnobs with oligarchs and sheikhs, and generally lives the life of the world’s most famous influencer.

The chyron under his face at matches sometimes reads “ex-England captain,” which, if you ever saw him play, feels like a ludicrous reduction, like calling Pavarotti a singer. For about a decade, between 1996 and 2006, Beckham was the best of England. Until last week, he was the only English male to have scored in three different World Cups; he led England in two of them.

And he was in the centre of the frame for England’s two most famous World Cup moments in the last forty years.

**

On June 7, 2002, England played Argentina in their first group match of the World Cup. Beckham had drawn the flashlights and the headlines from the moment England landed in Japan. He was the team captain, Manchester United’s talisman, husband to a Spice Girl, and suddenly, the wearer of a blonde, punk-rock mohawk. The cameras tailed him everywhere; he’d long since learnt to live with the flash as his shadow.

The game was stiff and cagey, moving this way and the other but never quite releasing its handbrakes. Then, in the 43rd minute, England forward Michael Owen was fouled in the penalty box by Argentina defender Mauricio Pochettino. The referee pointed to the penalty spot. And it was as if the rest of the field paused and spread out for David Beckham to take the ball and the occasion.

Beckham was known for a wand of a right foot. He could make the ball curl, dip, and swerve over long distances. If he played cricket, he’d open the bowling with his swing. His passes had a beatific quality, a sense of artistry. So when he took penalties, he hit them similarly, with the inside of his right foot, and the shot often traced a small curve.

This one he bludgeoned. He ran his right foot through the ball as if he wanted to tear through the leather. The ball went low, hard, and straight into the centre of the net—one of the most ungainly of his 146 career goals. But it was amongst his most significant.

England 1-0 Argentina. Beckham ran off to the left corner flag clutching his shirt, pulling at it, kissing the crest, screaming into the void. It was hard to tell whether he had a tear in his eye, because they were crunched tight. That moment gave us this picture.

This picture was twenty years in the making.

**

The Falkland Islands, Las Malvinas in Spanish, is an archipelago of 778 small, windswept dots of land in the South Atlantic ocean, around 300 miles east of Patagonia in southern Argentina. It had been a British territory since 1833; Argentina, however, always felt they owned the land instead. In April 1982, Argentina’s military invaded the islands. Margaret Thatcher’s Britain responded with a hundred war ships. On June 14, 1982, seventy-four days after the invasion, Argentina’s military surrendered. 649 Argentines were killed, many of them young conscripts who had been sent to the islands without proper food, clothing, or shelter. The survivors returned to a country, already suffocated under the debris of economic and social rubble, in complete mourning.

Thatcher, meanwhile, gave victory speeches and organised parades, asking the British public to “rejoice.”

**

The next time England faced Argentina in a major game, it was the quarter final of the 1986 World Cup, under an upright and unrelenting Mexico City sun. A lot had changed in the four years. Democracy had arrived in Argentina. The world’s greatest footballer was a proud, outspoken Argentine.

In Mexico, the Argentines maintained that football had nothing to do with the war. It was necessary fiction. Members of the 1982 squad had unfurled Las Malvinas son Argentinas banners before friendlies in the run-up to that tournament, wrapping themselves in the cause. By 1986 the banners were gone. There was silence instead, which was its own kind of statement. Diego Maradona, who understood theatre better than most, admitted later that it was all a facade. They thought of nothing else.

Argentina were the superior team, but couldn’t break through the dogged English defence in the first half. Six minutes into the second half, a mishit clearance lobbed up the ball in the England penalty box. Maradona ran towards it. The English goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, ran towards it too. Shilton was six foot tall, Maradona five-five. And yet, Maradona seemed to rise above Shilton and head the ball into the goal. Nine blue shirts converged around Maradona near the sideline while the replay was broadcast to the watching audience: Maradona had locked his left hand into a fist and raised it above his head, and the ball had bounced off it. Too late; 1-0.

Four minutes later, Maradona—now the centre of every play—received the ball in his own half. He pirouetted past two defenders, turning on the ball almost, then ran twenty yards along the right edge of the pitch, cut inward past one defender, then shimmied past one more, then around the goalkeeper, and dinked the ball into the net.

On Uruguayan radio, journalist Victor Hugo Morales held the mic.

“Maradona on the ball now. Two closing him down. Maradona rolls his foot over the ball and breaks away down the right, the genius of world football. He goes past a third, looks for Burruchaga. Maradona forever! Genius! Genius! Genius! He’s still going… Gooooal! Sorry, I want to cry! Good God! Long live football! What a goal! A memorable run from Maradona. The greatest solo goal of all time. Cosmic Kite, which planet did you come from?”

Within eleven seconds and eleven touches of the ball, Diego Maradona had pierced through the entire English defence, and, evidently, their spirit. The match finished 2-1 to Argentina. At the post-game press conference, when asked whether he had handled the ball, Maradona said the goal was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” Forty years on, the English still froth with rage if you mention this match.

“It was like beating a country, not a football team,” Maradona wrote in his autobiography. “Although we said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas War, we knew that a lot of Argentine kids had died there, that they had mowed us down like little birds. And this was revenge.”

**

Four years later, England went to the World Cup in Italy. They had, this time, a genius of theirs: Paul Gascoigne, Gazza to the English—twenty-three years old, bulky and brilliant, capable of doing things with a football that no Englishman had managed in a generation. Carried by Gazza and Gary Lineker, England reached the semi-final. They played West Germany, runners-up to Maradona’s Argentina last time around. In the other semi-final, Maradona’s Argentina faced the hosts. England were one game away from delicious, beautiful revenge.

Argentina beat Italy; England lost to West Germany in a penalty shoot-out. And if this wasn’t deep enough a cut, they failed to qualify for 1994, which turned out to be Maradona’s last sighting as a major, prime-time footballer. The moment had passed.

**

While the world prepared for the World Cup, England were welcoming a new order in their football. Manchester United, coached by the iron-fisted, granite-faced Scot, Alex Ferguson, had just won their second successive Premier League title, after waiting for twenty-six years for one. Ferguson’s eyes, though, weren’t set on the senior team alone. Working alongside youth coach Eric Harrison, he had turned United’s age-group sides into a production line. The batch that came through in 1992 won the FA Youth Cup. Among them: David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt.

By 1995, Alex Ferguson was jettisoning experienced first team players into the transfer market to make room for the teenagers. The football establishment, which in England was both conservative and sentimental, was appalled. Alan Hansen, who had won everything worth winning as a player at Liverpool and now dispensed wisdom from a television studio, delivered his verdict: “You can’t win anything with kids.” Ferguson, ever the rebel against convention, brought them all in.

Beckham made his debut in April 1995. Fresh faced with a crew-cut, a London boy growing up in Manchester, he looked like any other young footballer trying to find his feet. He was not like any other young footballer. Technically, he operated on a different frequency to everyone around him. Soon, he was beginning to stand out even amongst the big boys. By the start of the 1996-97 season, he was a starting lineup fixture. The crew cut was replaced by a blonde middle-parting that curved over his forehead and fell to the sides. He looked like a young Hollywood star. In a football culture that prized grime and distrusted flair, abhorred it even, Beckham was a lavish art gallery exhibit. He was beautiful and brilliant and he didn’t seem to think the two were incompatible. United handed him the number 10 shirt.

On August 17th, 1996, the opening day of the Premier League season, Beckham, too, received the ball in his own half with his team in the lead. And, like Maradona, he did what he did best. He planted his left leg, took his left arm around his torso, as if he was drawing the rings of Saturn, and with his body leaning to the left, hit the ball with the inside of his right foot. The ball rose and floated, cutting a parabola across 57 yards, over Wimbledon goalkeeper Neil Sullivan, and dipped into the net.

David Beckham became an overnight superstar. England—the football nation, the public, the television media, the songmakers, the theatre artists, the tabloid editors—were obsessed. By the time the 1998 World Cup came around, he was twenty-three, a first-pick for the national team, and already the most famous young man in the country.

**

In France, for their third group game, England faced Colombia. In the 29th minute, Beckham stood over the ball about thirty yards away from the Colombia goal, centre-aligned. Free-kick specialists like an angle to work with. From straight on, the goalkeeper can plant himself in the middle of the goal and wait, and the ball has to do something extraordinary to beat him. Beckham created the angle by approaching the dead ball from the side, curved it over and above the Colombian wall, swerving leftwards and dropping into the bottom corner. For England supporters who had spent years grieving the lost Gazza opportunity, this was evidence that a new genius had arrived.

England finished second in their group, and reached the first knockout round, the pre-quarter finals, where the draw coughed up their old foes, Argentina.

The match was a taut, nervous affair, missed passes turned over to attacks turned over to counter-attacks and tackles and fortuitous saves. In the 47th minute, the score 2-2, Beckham was shoulder-barged to the floor by Diego Simeone. Several seconds later, lying on his chest, Beckham kicked back out at Simeone. The ball wasn’t in play anymore, which meant the referee didn’t have a decision to make. Red card, in possibly the biggest match of his life.

England held on, somehow, and reached the penalty shoot-out, which proved a challenge too asphyxiating. Beckham, one of England’s best penalty-takers, watched from the dressing room.

The first blow came from an exasperated Glenn Hoddle, then the England coach; the red card, he said, “cost us dearly.” At home, fans burned effigies and protested with posters. The Mirror ran “10 Heroic Lions, One Stupid Boy” on their front page. The television media, too, stuck their fork in: fame had ruined him; he was too soft, too pretty, too distracted by his pop-star wife to handle the demands of international football. Beckham would reveal later that, after the match, he broke down in his parents’ arms.

The next morning, Alex Ferguson called him up. “Don't worry, go away for a few weeks ... come back to the club, and you've got us.”

**

Back at United, Beckham was surrounded by a team that functioned simultaneously as a brotherhood and a machine. He rediscovered the joy of football, and the ball kept tracing beautiful shapes off his right foot. From the right flank, he sent in cross after cross, pass after pass, and they all lined up to feast. This was the strongest United had been in a bit; they just wouldn’t lose. And when the ball was dead, either on a corner or just outside the penalty box, no one in England could match up to David Beckham. He scored a typical long-distance curler, albeit from open play, against Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final.

In the last ten days of the season, United faced three finals: Tottenham Hotspur at home to secure the league title, Newcastle at Wembley in the FA Cup final, Bayern Munich in Barcelona in the Champions League final. If they won all three, they’d become the first team in English history to complete the “treble” of league, cup, and continental titles in the same season.

Tottenham at home, first. As the clock ticked towards half time, with Tottenham leading 1-0 and a nervousness setting around Old Trafford, Beckham found the ball just outside the right side of the penalty box. He curled the ball into the far corner. Andy Cole scored in the second half. 2-1 Manchester United; league champions.

The FA Cup final, next. With one eye on the Champions League final, Alex Ferguson rotated his team. He kept Beckham, though, who turned in a near-flawless ninety-minute shift. United strolled home 2-0.

A few sleeps later, Manchester United arrived in sunny Barcelona with a gaping hole: Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, their first-choice centre-midfielders, were suspended. Scholes and Keane were United’s engine—Keane the bruiser and the midfield general; Scholes the metronome who brought control and precision. Beckham’s shoulder was tapped again, to fill in.

All great football teams are eventually judged for their continental success, like how tennis players are judged for their Wimbledon titles. United had won the Champions League only once in their history, thirty one years prior. It was more than just another final.

Bayern Munich went ahead in the sixth minute. United were competitive, but only in spurts. Bayern were better, physically stronger, and like a typical German team, innately knew how to handle the big game. For ninety minutes, United hustled and pushed, threw everything they had, but couldn’t break through. When they did, standing in the Bayern goal was the imposing wall called Oliver Kahn.

Ferguson threw all his forwards onto the pitch. In the 91st minute, less than two hundred seconds left on the clock, United received a corner on the left hand side. On commentary, Clive Tyldesley asked, “Can United score? They always score.”

Beckham stood over the ball in the narrow corner of the Camp Nou pitch and whipped the cross in. The ball rebounded off one player and another, hit a Bayern shin and a United head, and fell onto Teddy Sherringham’s path. 1-1. On the next play, United went again. There was no turning back now. Corner, again. Beckham, again. Pitch perfect cross, again. Sherringham flicked it behind, “AND SOLSKJAER HAS WON IT!”

Twelve months. That was all it took. Twelve months from burned effigies and front-page abuse to an open-top bus parade through Manchester, tens of thousands lining the streets, singing the name of the boy they had wanted to destroy. Manchester United won the league again the next season, then again the season after. At the centre of it all, orchestrating, delivering, bending the ball to his will, David Beckham.

England made him national team captain.

**

The luscious hair was gone by now, replaced by a Tyler Durden buzzcut—a lot less showbiz, a lot more rugged. The footballer was the same, jaw-dropping aesthete, but the leader had acquired an edge.

England, meanwhile, good ol’ England, ran head-first into a problem: they reached the brink of missing their second World Cup in three. When Greece came over for the final qualifying game in October 2001, England needed a draw, if not a win, for automatic qualification. Defeat would mean the indignity of a two-legged playoff, and a metaphorical knife-fight on the edge of a cliff.

The match was played at Old Trafford—Manchester United and Beckham’s home patch. He led the team out to seventy thousand singing throats. And, obviously, Greece took the lead within half an hour. England were their usual selves, the dissonance between their technical ability and collective cohesion stark as ever. And yet, around those fumbling white shirts, Beckham was extraordinary. He wasn’t running so much as pounding grass on behalf of everyone else. We often use the term, “captain’s performance” to describe a captain clinching the decisive moment. This was the purest distillation of a captain’s performance: one man trying to drag a talented-yet-clumsy team to the World Cup by sheer force of will.

In the second half, England equalised, then Greece scored again. Beckham took about half a dozen free kicks, many of them earned through his forceful dribbling, but couldn’t find the target. The regulation time ended, and the fourth official signalled for injury time.

In the 93rd minute, England won another free kick. Central to the goal, about thirty yards out—the hardest angle there is. It was, in all possibility, the last chance of the match. The digital scoreboard read England 1-2 Greece. David Beckham stood over the ball, facing the famous Stretford End, which had seen him go from boy to wunderkind to genius to villain to genius to leader. Here he was, England’s World Cup tickets, his reputation, his captaincy—all on the line.

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And so we arrive at Sapporo, Japan, on a sweaty, balmy evening. Another World Cup, another match against Argentina.

The ball, dead and still. Over it, David Beckham, England’s David Beckham, surrounded by the shirt that had given him and his country so much agony.

I shouldn’t be awake either. I had gone to bed four hours ago, right after watching France be France against Senegal. This is the first World Cup in my living memory that I am keeping at an arm’s length. I have been questioning if I love Brazil enough to wake up at 3:30 am to watch them struggle to stitch four passes against Morocco. But, it is still a World Cup. For all its garish clothing, abrasive behaviour, and water breaks arriving like planned power cuts, there remain things worth the alarm. One of them is called Lionel Messi.

Argentina are a good team, and like any good tournament team, they’re built for endurance more than thrill. When Lionel Scaloni was handed over the coaching duties in 2018, he was given one diktat: win us the World Cup. Messi, thirty-one years old then, ran a very real risk of finishing his career without one. So Scaloni built a team around Messi, with one tweak: the maximalist robe Messi had worn for Argentina, almost by compulsion, was folded away. This Argentina needed Messi the minimalist, the touch player, the magician who could vanish and reappear. Sometimes, like in the second goal of the 2022 World Cup final, all the team needed was a turn and a touch. Sometimes, a piercing pass, threaded through a gap of inches. For the rest, Messi would know when to wear his cape, from two decades of muscle memory. Scaloni spread the creative responsibilities across his attack, and built a wall of midfield and defence that wouldn’t yield an inch. So, waking up for Argentina’s Messi was a gamble worth taking, but a gamble nonetheless.

The Arrowhead Stadium, in Kansas City, is tall, wide, and roofless, like a wok without a lid. I notice Messi as he leads his team out. The sun is dipping behind the giant rugby ball-shaped electronic screen perched on the far side, and he’s taking the sight in. There was an intensity to Messi’s face in 2018 and 2022, a tightness in his jaw and eyes, perhaps from the tension of not knowing if he was on his last chance for a World Cup. That burden has been lifted. This is a World Cup and multiple Copa America-winner Messi. His shoulders are loose; his face, carrying the puff of age, is a lot more soft around the edges. I didn’t think Messi would play this World Cup. Last September, when the Buenos Aires crowd serenaded him, carrying posters of “Gracias por todo,” I took that for an ending. With his life’s objective fulfilled, I thought he would unlace his shoes. I am glad he didn’t.

Here, then, is a full World Cup of Messi ahead of us. There’s a quirk about watching a genius: for 85-87 minutes of a 90-minute game, you don’t watch them at all. Professional footballers, a widely-accepted theory goes, are in possession of the ball for two minutes a game, at best. The rest of the time is spent covering ground, shadowing runners, waiting to sprint, sprinting without a pass, pressing, jostling—you get the drift.

Messi may be football’s greatest ever walker. He wafts in and out of spaces, like air, a faint outline behind the hyperactive movement of others. He isn’t lazy—he works diligently in defence when his team needs it. Most of his walking happens as his team patiently builds up its moves. Messi waits, several beats ahead. And then, as the ball moves into his quarter, you feel the wind change direction. Your back straightens. Something snaps into motion within him. Your eyes leave the ball and start searching for him. Often, the move won’t complete and the possession would be recycled, but there is a thrill to the anticipation, a sensation that magic might be a five-yard pass away.

The first such moment of this game comes around the fifth minute, as Argentina move the play high on their left wing. Messi, almost stationary, suddenly springs to life and sprints into the penalty box. The pass to him never materialises, but the attempt brings the crowd to their feet. They have their first “ooooh” of the night.

The ball eventually finds him around minute seven. Argentina move forward in a wave. Messi receives the ball, pirouettes on his left leg, turns to see Algerian defenders standing in a double-layered wall, and passes the ball behind. He understands tempo, this guy. Maybe, in a previous life, he was a musician or a poet. So he just moves the play along, lowers the heartbeat. Not now. With every little touch and turn, the heart pumps a little faster, but he’s asking you to settle in. Ninety minutes is a long time.

This passage, still, highlights a couple of truths about the play we’re a captive audience to: one, Messi is 39. There was a version of him, not too many years gone, that would’ve seen two blocks of defenders and taken them on. It used to be his thing. He would slip past defenders, a ribbon snake on a swamp, the ball glued to his shoe. The mind inevitably wanders to all the goals he’s scored like this: his first great goal, against Getafe; the semi-final goal against Real Madrid; then, the one against Athletic Bilbao, so incredible in dexterity, so fluid in motion, it was sent to a lab to analyse. Those days are long past us. Even Messi, it turns out, has to reconcile with time.

The second truth is that Messi understands this. Which is incredible. Athletes who touch sustained greatness get there by believing nothing is beyond their reach. Sachin Tendulkar did not retire because he ran out of belief; his body just caught up with his spirit. Rafael Nadal deeply understands fear and insecurity, as the documentary Rafa shows us vividly, but he never thought that a tennis match could not be won. Most who reach the very top of a sport carry a version of this sickness. For Messi to be Messi and still be alive to the erosion within him is a gift almost as rare as his football skills.

Around the tenth minute, Lautaro Martínez dinks the ball towards Messi, setting him one-on-one with the Algerian goalkeeper, Luca Zidane, son of Zinedine. Messi takes two deft touches towards the goal, and, in the same motion, dummies a shot, swinging his foot in a hitting arc and breaking—the arc, not his stride—at the last moment. The goalkeeper, already crouching low, has lost balance, his legs buckling under him. My throat has belted out “Messi!” or some such. With his next touch, Messi scoops the ball over the goalkeeper, into the net. The American commentator screams like he would for a home run. The linesman raises his flag to signal offside. Messi nods, knowingly. It’ll come.

In the seventeenth minute, the ball is played to Messi again, who’s standing halfway between the centre circle and Algeria’s penalty box. The pass is quick and vertical, cutting past a line of defence, signalling aggression. Messi turns while receiving the ball, cushioning it on his inside leg as he sets off towards the goal. The heart pumps again. There are two passes available to him on either side, or a longer dribble if he chooses so. I’m up from my chair. The defenders, two-thirds his age, are backing off. It’s logically a wise decision; to apply pressure on Messi is to douse fire with your hands. But it’s also a perilous decision. He takes one step, two steps, and then thwack! About twenty-five yards away from the goal, Messi has let rip. The ball curls between two defenders, over and sideways from the goalkeeper, touches his outstretched fingers, and sploshes into the white mesh of the goal.

It’s a superb shot, but only by the standards applicable to everyone else. If you have watched enough of Messi, this is a goal you’ve seen a hundred times over. I doubt Messi thought much about the shot himself—it was too close to the ‘keeper, too many inches away from the top corner for his liking. The moment, regardless, was incredible. He stretched his hands wide, like the wings of a bird, and went on a long celebratory run before letting himself be wrapped in Argentine hands and bodies. Messi is playing his sixth World Cup, and perhaps, for the first time, with true freedom.

Twenty years back, a few weeks after Messi’s thrilling World Cup debut against Serbia and Montenegro, David Foster-Wallace published an essay on Roger Federer. Titled ‘Roger Federer as a Religious Experience’, the essay has become something like a Messi highlight—timeless, a reference for its craft, and quoted at every opportunity, not least by this writer. It starts thus: “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K. The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples.”

Replace Federer with Messi, Swiss with Argentine, and the paragraph sits just as neatly for The Messi Experience™ in the last couple of decades. I have given up, over the years, trying to be civil while watching him. The sounds, whatever they are, are involuntary; it’s my body reacting to him. I’m sure a sound was made when the ball turned right, mid air, and hit the Algerian net. Other sounds were made too, in spurts, throughout the first half, even if there weren’t any other goals. There was a body feint here, a little dribble there, the anticipation of sorcery enough to set off a spark.

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The faces of the Algerian defenders tell a story. They know they are at one man’s mercy. They start the second half better. Argentina respond, with their gang of muscular tyros moving into attacking zones and taking their shots. Messi is fairly peripheral. He’s around, floating in the vicinity of the action, but outside the frame. Then, in the sixtieth minute, another midfielder takes his shot from long range. The ball flies low into the goalkeeper’s hand, and pops right back out. Oh. Messi has taken off for the rebound. Behind him, the Algerian defender takes one step drops. Easy, 2-0.

Rewind the footage to the moment the goalkeeper spills the ball, and you’ll notice Messi uncoiled, already sprinting. A lot of football, sport even, happens between events. You’ll hear top-level pros talking about visualisation and anticipation. This, is what they mean. Messi, like all good forwards, has reacted to the possibility, not the play.

Just a few moments later, another ball from the midfield is sent towards Messi—fully switched on now, playing near the last defensive line. His first touch takes him beyond the nearest defender, as if his body is moving in union with the ball. Oh yes. Second touch, further. Only the keeper and eighteen yards between him and the goal. Oh yes! The left foot uncoils, loads, and snaps. The shot’s good, the goalkeeper equal to it. Messi slows down, smiling. Oooh, it’s coming.

There is an air of inevitability to Messi in this mode. You cannot always reason logically that the next one is coming; you just know it is, like how you know it will rain from looking at the sky and smelling the air. Algeria’s defenders seem to know it too. They are a half-yard deeper than they were five minutes ago. I wonder if, all those years ago, Jerome Boateng, one of the best defenders in the world, playing for one of the best teams in the world, saw it coming too.

Argentina are in fifth gear now. Passes fly forward with real speed, slicing through defensive lines. Algeria, already fragile, are getting opened up. The ball is moved to the left flank, and passed back across the penalty box, just outside, on the edge of the ‘D’. There stands Messi. One touch, another touch, both sideways, and that left foot drawn back again.

An archer’s range of motion, in sequence, can be described as: nock, draw, anchor, aim, release, follow through. Messi doesn’t need to anchor, neither does he need time to aim. He lets his muscle memory take over. The destination is certain from the moment the ball leaves his foot. It moves low, hovering over the ground, swerving outside then inside, sneaking in near the post, almost kissing it. It’s impossible to stop for a goalkeeper who had been standing, reasonably, near the centre of the goal. My flatmate must be a deep sleeper because I have no clue how my shriek hasn’t woken him up. 3-0, hat-trick. Messi is on his follow-through, smiling, waiting for his friends to join him.

I am a frequent borrower of words, and the words I’m thinking of in this moment belong to an Uruguayan man, born on the other side of River Plate from Messi.

“One fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball. The ball seeks him out, knows him, needs him. She rests and rocks on the top of his foot. He caresses her and makes her speak, and in that tête-à-tête millions of mutes converse.”

We have been watching Messi for twenty years now—he first wore the Argentina shirt at a World Cup as an eighteen-year-old substitute, gangly, sharp and slippery, while his current coach played right of defence. His longevity is a marvel in itself. Football is a young athlete’s sport. It’s ruthless, ready to discard you the moment your hamstrings start moaning. Besides, playing centre-forward is serious work. And yet here he is, thirty-nine in three days, still the most decisive man on a pitch occupied by players at least a decade younger and quicker.

There was a little bit of poetry in the placement of this hat-trick too. In the six hours preceding this game, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, 27 and 26, from France and Norway, had scored two goals each. They are the present and future, exhibits of elite talent meeting unimaginable confidence and superhuman, almost lab-created, physicality. They don’t beat so much as pummell opponents into submission. For illustration, check out Mbappé’s second goal from the night, a thirty-five yard rocket that left the Senegal goalkeeper tapping at thin air. Messi is playing his sixth World Cup and sits with sixteen World Cup goals. Mbappé has fourteen and he has only begun his third.

Messi is nothing like them, never was. For him, the goal happens when it has to. The journey there, the passes, the dribbles, the magic that sometimes pays off, sometimes doesn’t—that has always been his raison d’etre. The play isn’t a means to an end, but the end itself.

While everything around him evolves, gathering pace and muscle, accumulating bricks for football as a more frantic, more dramatic spectacle than ever before, Messi wafts in and out of space, like air, waiting for the moment when he can play with the ball. Even in his minimalist avatar, there’s a boyish joy to what he does. Maybe that’s why we love him with a tender, heartfelt warmth. Maybe that’s why he transcends the petty discourse of team fandom. And maybe that’s what makes Messi eternal, worth waking up red-eyed for, even if he’s 39 and puffy-faced.

Mexico 1970, IX Campeonato Mundial de Futbol. The ninth men’s World Cup, the first broadcasted in colour.

The footage from Mexico 1970 is mesmerising. The pale, sun-bleached grass, the heat one can sense from the brightness of the pictures, the royal blue of Italy a cooling shade against the ground, the Brazilian yellow vivid, forming an association of colour with weight when worn by Pelé and Rivelino. Rivelino even rocked a proper ‘70s ‘stache! Pelé leaping over an English marker; Gordon Banks moving through air, birdlike almost, somehow getting enough palm and power to thwart the ball.

Then the final. I’ve watched that game in full, many times over. It’s an exhibition—no, a demonstration—of what it means to truly play football. Many consider it, rightly, the most artistic football ever produced. I think it was the most relaxed that sport ever got. Play the footage, open another tab with a street capoeira beat, and you’ll know what I mean.

And, of course, Carlos Alberto’s goal. The final goal of the tournament, possibly the greatest team goal ever scored, given context and beauty—a sequence of short, deliberate passes, a cheeky stepover, more unhurried passing, players moving around each other as if they were in a synchronised dance, Pelé’s pause, just for a breath, his right foot going over the ball and holding its arc, and, while walking, a casual pass rightwards, as Carlos Alberto roared in like a bullet train and took his shot without breaking stride.

Italy, at the time, had a reputation of being defensive gods— the two Milan clubs had won four of the last eight European Cups. And yet, Brazil made them chase ghosts for ninety minutes in the oppressive Mexico City noon.

I was born in a World Cup year, about three months after Lothar Matthäus neutralised Diego Maradona in Milan, and West Germany—runners up at the previous two World Cups—finally got their gold. The first football tournament I properly watched was also a World Cup: France 1998. I remember that we had moved the television to the bedroom, because some matches would start at 9:30, and some after midnight. The World Cup, back then, was the most important and prestigious trophy in the sport. Club football was intense, deeply entrenched into local community and rivalry, but the World Cup was the big deal. Pele and Maradona’s legacies were cemented after their heroics in national colours; Ronaldo, and I, would have to endure heartbreak before catharsis four years later.

The World Cup announces itself some months before the actual tournament, as teams start qualifying and missing out. This time, Italy dominated the headlines after missing their third consecutive World Cup. Italy won the World Cup in 2006. Since that time, their men’s football team has won as many World Cup matches as their men’s cricket team: one. For me, who grew up on Maldini and Del Piero and Totti, there was an initial shock, but over the years, seeing how insular the Serie A has become, how distant it is to other major European Leagues, their absence isn’t a surprise anymore. Italian football has developed a knack for a nosedive.

It was good to see Norway qualify for the first time after ’98, when they beat Brazil in the group stages. I have faint memories of Tore Andre Flo bustling past the Brazil defenders for the equalising goal. My heart, though, was made up by Haiti and Curacao qualifying. This is a 48-team World Cup and three American countries co-hosting and qualifying by default meant more spots for the continent, but there’s something to be said about Haiti playing against Brazil, Curacao against Germany, that makes the tournament richer.

Aside from the qualification process, there is also the pre-gaming, which starts as the regular domestic season enters its final laps. Back in the day, ESPN would treat us to special documentaries on every World Cup in a chronological order. You didn’t want to miss Hungary in 1954 and Pele in ’58. By the lead-up weeks, you’d reach 1982 and Socrates—how Brazil messed that Italy game up, only they’d know. Maradona in ’86, Maradona in ’90. Baggio, good lord. These days, I use YouTube for that kind of footage.

And there’s, of course, the written word. Until 2018, Brian Glanville would publish an updated edition of The Story of the World Cup every four years. Somewhere back home, I have about five different editions. Glanville has since left us, and Simon Kuper and Jonathan Wilson have written wonderful books for this summer. Kuper and Wilson have decades of experience reporting and covering World Cups, and their new books are genuinely rich in detail, worthy of your desk or coffee table.

There’s also a new series, a three-parter on the history of World Cups, written by Jonathan O’Brien. Last month, I was very kindly given access to a review copy. An essay on World Cups, and the book, was published on Scroll today.

Some excerpts:

“The World Cup, by design, is simultaneously heavy and weightless. Weightless because name counts for nothing. You could be Cameroon, in just your second ever World Cup, facing defending champions Argentina, and you have an equal chance at victory. Heavy because its quadrennial cycle brings tension and anxiety. Four years is a generation in football; lives change in that time.

And the best way to experience a World Cup is to ditch the abstract and watch it through the 3D glasses of history and context, the past breathing under the surface, the stakes of the future. For example, apply just one layer of context to Cameroon’s victory against Argentina in 1990: Argentina were led by the world’s greatest player of the time, or perhaps ever, Diego Maradona; the World Cup was happening in Italy, where Maradona played his club football; and Cameroon, African champions but a motley crew to the global eye, beat them 1-0 on the opening day.”

Maradona’s Argentina would recover and reach the final, where they’d face the same opponents they’d beaten four years prior: West Germany. The man asked to mark Maradona in Mexico City was now West Germany’s captain, and perhaps the best midfielder in the world. By the end of the night, he’d lift the World Cup—the last for a team called West Germany.

Then, there’s the story of another number 10.

“It is day two of the 1998 World Cup, and Italy are losing to Chile. The Bordeaux sky is faint white, awaiting dusk. With seven minutes left in the game, the referee points to the penalty spot and gives Italy a lifeline. Baggio, 31 years old, wearing number 18, places the ball on the penalty spot and takes four steps back. Both sections of the crowd are on their feet, hooting at him. Behind his restrained face lies a raging storm.

The significance of this penalty has nothing to do with the score. Neither does it have much to do with Roberto Baggio potentially becoming the first Italian to score in three World Cups. All its weight comes from another penalty, four years prior.

Baggio then wore jersey number 10, the number reserved for artists and maestros. He was the best player in the world. He stood above the penalty spot in Pasadena, California, with the 1994 World Cup on the line. And then he hit his penalty over the bar, into the crowd behind the goal, sealing the fate of the game and his life. Many in Italy still consider Baggio one of the greatest to have ever worn their blue, but the defining image of his career was that ball sailing into the Californian sky. He would later say it was the one episode he would erase if he had a magic wand.

So when, four years on, in Italy’s first World Cup match since that wretched afternoon, the referee blew for a penalty, everyone looked at Baggio. Did he have the heart to go again?

He scored; Italy salvaged a draw.”

There’s much more in the essay—on Brazil’s heartbreak, Pele’s arrival, Maradona vs England, a World Cup in Qatar, and Donald Trump.

The 2026 Men’s World Cup starts in four days. The book is genuinely excellent. Pick it up!

We’d heard of Kylian Mbappé. We’d heard that he had broken into AS Monaco’s first team when he was sixteen. Sixteen year olds don’t play senior football, but Mbappé, the word went, was nothing like anything we’d known before. We’d then seen him twist Manchester City and Juventus in the Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain shelled out 180 million of their crispiest Qatar-kissed euros, making an eighteen-year-old the subject of the second-most expensive transfer in football history. That he was special was not up for debate, but how special remained to be seen.

And now, in the compressed heat of a World Cup knockout game, opposite Lionel Messi and Angel di Maria, Mbappe was leaving some of the world’s most experienced defenders flailing, grasping at thin air. There are moments when you know you’re watching someone ascend between planes. This was not another winger blessed with a lean body and fast-twitch fibres, or a forward with a thunderous shot. Mbappe had both those gifts, which he’d reveal generously over the following weeks, but he had that other, intangible quality that separates the elite from the rest: everyone was always catching up to him.

This crack of lightning, piercing through the Argentine defence, was an announcement of arrival.

**

Kylian Mbappe was born five months and eight days after the greatest night in French football history. Under an inky Paris sky and the shimmering floodlights of State de France, France beat Brazil 3-0 to win their first Men’s World Cup. One of thirteen participants of the inaugural World Cup in 1930, hosts in 1938, France had waited an eternity for this moment.

French football was considered European royalty in the mid-eighties. Carried by Michel Platini’s genius, France won the European Championships in 1984 and reached the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup. They also won gold at the Los Angeles Olympics. And just when they should’ve taken the next leap towards greatness, they fell on a series of trapdoors, failing to qualify for the next European Championship and the next two World Cups.

The home World Cup came as respite and an opportunity to reclaim some of the lost lustre. Still, success meant quarter-finals, or, at best, the semi-finals. France weren’t yet ready to take on the heavyweights. They crossed all those hurdles, but the elation from reaching the final was broken by fear: they’d have to face Brazil—the defending champions; a lineup of Ronaldo and Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos and Cafu and Bebeto; the country that produced Pele, Garrincha, and Rivelino; the country where football went mud-caked and came out looking resplendent.

France did not let Brazil enter the match. The 3-0 final score was fitting for France’s dominance, and equally charitable to Brazil. Later that evening, the limestone beams of the Arc de Triomphe were lit up with the face of a new national hero: Zinedine Zidane. Usually the creative pulse of the side, Zidane had scored twice in the final and put the game past Brazil’s reach.

To have watched Zidane play is to have seen football turn into ballet. He glided through grass, whether running towards or with the ball. He was loose, able to stop, turn, or slide through spaces. Defenders running full speed into a tackle were forced to apply emergency brakes, and then change directions and chase him at full speed. But, for all that languidity, he was never late to a ball or a tackle. The ball, whenever it came to him, stopped dead at his feet, like a stress ball landing on velvet. Everyone else sought to control the ball; the ball, itself, came to Zidane’s feet to be loved. He’d do with a touch—a pat from the back of his heel, a gentle caress from his sidestep—what most needed a kick for.

Football had many players with rare gifts, but Zidane was the one you watched even when he did not have the ball. He was so mesmerising a creation that two movie directors set up seventeen cameras to follow him for an entire game, and then turned the footage into a feature film. On sensory experience, Zidane was the successor to Mark Knopfler and the precursor to Roger Federer.

Zidane represented something else France had long wanted to claim. He was born to Algerian parents in La Castellane, a residential suburb along the northern edge of Marseille. His father had moved from Algeria in 1953—the year before the war of independence.

France was flourishing at the time. The prosperity of the post-war years brought industry, which brought factories and construction sites. And that brought with it a problem: labour. So France opened their ports. The immigrants came, en masse, from Algeria and Morocco, Senegal and Mali. The state built housing for them on the outskirts of the major cities, and gave those districts a collective noun: banlieues.

The 1998 World Cup-winning team was called Black, Blanc, Beur—black, white, Arab—a wordplay on the tricolour’s Bleu, Blanc, Rouge. Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, had won France the final; Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, had scored both goals in the semi-final. Around them were Patrick Vieira, Theirry Henry, Marcel Desailly. The team was visibly, undeniably, a product of the banlieues.

The French received them with a long, warm embrace. But the story, manifesting over one glorious summer, had a tension simmering underneath. A significant chunk of the republic wanted the immigrants to shed their language, culture, and faith, and wear traditional French garb. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a politician who had previously called the national team a collection of players from foreign countries, reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002.

Three years after that, in October 2005, two teenagers—Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré—were electrocuted in a power substation in Seine-Saint-Denis, while hiding from a police check. Twenty-one days of riots followed. Nearly nine thousand cars were burned across France. The government declared a state of emergency. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, surveying the burning suburbs, called the rioters racaille—scum. When France imploded, in shameful flames, at the 2010 World Cup, Minister Roselyne Bachelot referred to players of colour as “immature banlieue criminals.”1

Seine-Saint-Denis was and is the poorest department in metropolitan France. More than a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. Youth unemployment in some of its communes runs past thirty percent. It is eleven miles from the centre of Paris; in some parts, you cannot reach it by metro at all.

**

Bondy is in Seine-Saint-Denis. It was here that Kylian Mbappé was born, to Wilfried and Fayza—Cameroonian and Algerian. Wilfried was the coach and director at AS Bondy, the local football team; Fayza was a professional handball player. Kylian was six years old during the 2005 riots.

He wanted only football. He’d watch hours without break and sleep with a ball for a pillow. By the time he was six, he was enrolled at AS Bondy. Antonio Ricardi, the under-13s coach at AS Bondy, told the BBC, “Kylian would always think about football, always talk about football, always watch football - and if he wasn’t doing that he’d be playing football games on the PlayStation.”

Ricardi also understood, quickly, that he had stumbled onto something rare. “Kylian could do much more than the other children,” he said. “His dribbling was already fantastic and he was much faster than the others.” When Kylian was eleven, his talent and reputation quickly outgrowing Bondy, he was taken to Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine—an academy nestled inside the lush woods of the Rambouillet forest.2

Every year, Clairefontaine trials the best young players in the Greater Paris region, and from there, about two dozen make it through. Then comes their point of difference. Unlike most academies in Europe, even the best ones—in Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Munich—Clairefontaine doesn’t mould young footballers for archetypical football roles. Its purpose, almost ideological, is to produce a complete, versatile footballer. The trainees are subject to two years of the most rigorous and methodical coaching, at the end of which they’re ready for any football, anywhere.

At Clairefontaine, Kylian learnt how to use his feet and body, how to move without the ball, and how to use the gift of speed he was born with.3 He was in his final year, a few hours away from turning fourteen, when his family got a call from Real Madrid. The club wanted to give Kylian a trial. So, the family flew down to Spain. Receiving young Kylian and crew at the airport, according to this report, was Zinedine Zidane—the past shaking hands with the future.

Wilfried and Fayza were impressed, but they believed it was too soon. In France, they reasoned, he would develop faster, the pathway from academy to a first team unencumbered by a royal team’s ambitions. They were right. At just sixteen, Kylian was walking out for AS Monaco.

**

By 2018, by the end of that quarter-final against Argentina, Kylian Mbappé had arrived. He scored twice that afternoon. Then he scored in the final—only the second teenager, the first since Pelé, to do so. He returned to Paris Saint-Germain colours and continued piling on the goals.

Four years later, he met Argentina again. Mbappé, by now, had become a phenom, technically and physically on a different plane to everyone else in the tournament. He had outgrown the club that had paid €180 million for him, and was now in a courtship with the sparkling white royalty of Real Madrid.

In the final, though, Mbappé was the forced antagonist. The match, and so much of the tournament, had been largely seen through Lionel Messi. This was perhaps Messi’s final shot at glory, one last chance to bury the accumulated heartbreaks of the previous decade. Argentina were 2-0 up at half-time.

In the French dressing room, Didier Deschamps—captain of the ‘98 World Cup winning side, coach now—was tearing into his team. The France team were listening, despondent, when Kylian rose: “It’s a World Cup final! We’re down by two goals. We can come back. Guys, this is every four years!”

The second half started, and more minutes went by. Argentina’s defence, built with muscle and trademark South American grit, smothered everything France could offer. They didn’t let Mbappé come near the goal. Then, with just over ten minutes remaining, France were awarded a penalty. Mbappé converted and entered the rare group of players to have scored in two World Cup finals—Zidane was one, Pelé another.

A couple of minutes later, as the average global heart-rate was rising into the 130s, Mbappé saw a lobbed pass on the left side of the box. Most would let it bounce, then either shoot or take a forward touch. Mbappé flung himself sideways, and while parallel to the ground, lashed his right leg at the ball—all in a blink. It was a perfectly-struck volley, and yet, utterly inexplicable in form and the speed of its execution. 2-2.

This is the moment where Mbappé’s stature became clear. Messi had spent sixteen years in an Argentine shirt pursuing that elusive, golden World Cup trophy. He was thirty-five, and this was almost certainly his last chance. And yet, watching Mbappé in those minutes, it felt wholly probable that a twenty-three-year-old was about to take it from him single-handedly. There are very few players in the history of football about whom such a thing could credibly be said.

The match went into extra time. Messi scored, Mbappé scored. With seconds to go, and both benches preparing for a penalty shoot-out, Mbappé found a loose ball in the penalty box, like the one he had found four years back, but this time within a shot’s distance from the goal. He twisted past one defender, wriggled past another, and uncoiled his right leg. If one were to extract the collective sound emanating from Argentina in that moment, it would be the Spanish version of, “Oh, fuck.” Somehow, perhaps by divine intervention, an Argentine leg came flying, and Mbappé’s shot was blocked.

The penalty shoot-out went Messi’s way and football’s most enduring romance of the 21st century finally got its just ending. Mbappé was the tournament’s highest scorer, and for long stretches, including the final, its most dominant player.

**

In the summer of 2024, Kylian Mbappé left Paris Saint-Germain on a free transfer and joined Real Madrid. His journey at PSG had been left unresolved. The club was renovated on the idea that assembling the most expensive players would produce the most successful team, with Mbappé as the centrepiece. There were seasons when the PSG frontline read: Mbappé, Messi, Neymar. The Champions League, the one trophy all that Qatari expenditure was underwritten for, never arrived.

Luis Enrique joined as coach in 2023, and immediately declared his ideology. Football, as he conceived it, was a collective enterprise, a system of interlocking commitments. Messi and Neymar had left by then. Mbappé, whose gifts were of the kind that bends systems toward itself, found himself, perhaps for the first time in his professional life, at the margins of a coach’s vision.

The year after he left, PSG won the Champions League, dismantling Internazionale 5-0 in the final. It was the most emphatic victory in the history of a major European final. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Mbappé scored 44 goals in his first season—more than any debutant in the club’s history. Real Madrid ended the season trophyless. Last night, in Budapest, PSG won their second consecutive Champions League title. Mbappé, for his part, scored 42 goals in 44 games in another barren season for Real Madrid.

There is a popular theory, now supported by evidence, that PSG have become a better team without the overarching shadow of Mbappé. And that Real Madrid, for all the individual production, are suffering from it.

The questions tailing him from Paris—about tension, discomfort, and misalignment—have become audible again. Mbappé wasn’t solely responsible, of course, but had a part to play in the strained relationship between Real Madrid and their new coach, Xabi Alonso, in the first few months of this season.

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Football had been waiting, for some years, for the generation after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to produce a worthy successor. It’s no ordinary task. The mountains those two men built, through a combination of individual and collective glory, through a dominance so relentless every other player in the sport became a supporting character, cannot be scaled by just about anyone. Mbappé is the closest thing to either of them.

The World Cup comes at an apt moment. Kylian Mbappé will arrive in the United States this summer 27 years old, fully formed. He’ll be just about the same age as Zidane was in 1998. He’ll lead a French unit happy to orbit around his atmospheric talents. He’ll wear the captain’s armband on jersey number 10—Zidane’s number—and carry French pluralism and excellence along with him. Twelve of his teammates grew up in the banlieues; twelve play for Europe’s elite clubs, like Bayern Munich, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. The players France left out of their squad could probably finish third in this tournament.

If I were to stick my neck out for a prediction: Kylian Mbappé will receive the World Cup trophy on July 19th from, in all likelihood, Donald Trump. There are other great teams at the tournament, but none as stacked as France, none with a spearhead as sharp as Kylian Mbappé.