No amount of Lionel Messi is ever enough

To the cynical eye, the first felt ever so slightly soft. Lionel Messi’s effort was good, rather than great. It was not quite in the corner. As he dived, Luca Zidane, the Algeria goalkeeper, seemed to have it within reach, only to misjudge his timing, his stretch, or possibly his chosen profession. The ball brushed his fingers as it sailed past.

The second, too, was a bit of a gift. Zidane failed to hold Alexis Mac Allister’s stinging shot. The ball squirmed away from him, and there was Messi again, ambling in, dropping his shoulder so nonchalantly he might almost have been bored, and effortlessly leaving Zidane – yes, son of – stranded with the rebound.

If you were that way inclined, it would still have been possible at that stage to believe all of the things we have decided we know about Messi. This is a World Cup too far. He has been in a “retirement league” since 2023, going through the motions. He is nearly 39. At his age, he is a cross between Argentina’s mascot and a very convincing tribute act. Like all living things, his genius has tended toward entropy. 

And then he scored the third. The third was the Messi goal, the one that he has been scoring for 20 years or more, the one that is so familiar it is almost a waste of words to describe it. Messi has the ball 25 yards out from goal. Messi takes one touch to set himself, a second to open up his body, and a third to whip a shot past Zidane’s outstretched arms. 

In a strictly technical sense, it was the goal that sealed – remarkably, when you think about it – the first World Cup hat-trick of his career, one of the vanishingly rare peaks he had not scaled years ago. It was also the goal that drew him level with Miroslav Klose as the leading scorer in World Cup history. One more and, in this as in so many things, he stands alone.

And that is very impressive, but it is also just a little dry. A bit soulless. Messi has collected a variety of absurd statistics over the course of his career; he holds, as the old joke goes, the record for the number of records broken. He has always been much more than his numbers. No matter how many times you watch Messi, it is impossible not to feel the pulse quicken and the breath catch and the heart soar.

Perhaps since the last time he played in a game of this profile – the World Cup final in 2022 – the folk memory of that has faded just a little. Outside those who religiously watch Major League Soccer, Messi has only really existed in snatches for three years: 20-second reels in which he tees up a trundling Luis Suárez or nutmegs a college prospect called Braylen or curls a shot into the top corner while very obviously not trying at all.

That has made the relentless focus on him in the run-up to his sixth World Cup feel ever so slightly jarring. Fox Sports, the host broadcaster, had been trailing this game with such gusto that it has felt a little like the rest of the tournament was just an extended undercard. Messi, very clearly, is the designated main event.

The promos have run before, during and after almost every game. “And then Tuesday,” they have intoned, “Lionel Messi arrives at the World Cup.” The anticipation has been undercut only slightly by the fact that these proclamations have invariably been followed by an advert featuring Messi: here he is arguing about light beer with Billy Bob Thornton, or eating some crisps, or pretending to understand why Timothée Chalamet has to be involved.

It has, on one level, provided a powerful riposte to those who believe Messi moved to the United States for an easy life, departing Paris St-Germain as his brilliance started to fade so that he could quietly disappear at Inter Miami. Judging by the volume of his commercial work, he may well never have been busier. One estimate has suggested he features in a quarter of the World Cup-themed adverts running in the United States, Britain and Argentina. (The other three-quarters are about David Beckham building garden furniture.)

On another, though, it has compounded the suspicion that Messi is now more celebrity than athlete, that he is in the United States to make hay while the last of the sun shines, that his move was – and there is no judgment here – a fairly transparent commercial play, even that his determination to play in a sixth World Cup was to some extent rooted in brand-building.

He was, certainly, the draw. Outside Arrowhead Stadium, seven traffic-choked miles from the centre of Kansas City, tens of thousands of Argentine fans streamed towards the stadium. 

Some had come from Argentina, the travelling army that follows the national team around, but many more had made slightly shorter journeys, Americans of Argentine extraction. All of them seemed to be wearing shirts emblazoned with his name. None of them, surely, could have imagined what they were about to see. 

But that is the thing with Messi. It always has been. His brilliance can never be overstated; after two decades as both the best and most scrutinised player in the world, he somehow retains the capacity to surprise. No matter how sure you are he has reached the outer limit of his talent, he can find another boundary, another edge.

By the end, a sort of delirium had set in. The first goal had been greeted with jubilation; this was what they had come to see. The second was closer to ecstasy, a dream being realised. His name rang around Arrowhead, as it has almost every stadium in which he has played, as his adoring public prostrated themselves in front of him.

But the third was greeted with something deeper, wilder, a frenzy that felt almost religious. That is what Messi has always done. There is no measure of cynicism that can survive the sheer, childlike wonder he inspires, no grizzled wisdom that he cannot convert to giddiness and awe. Perhaps that is his greatest gift, the truest gauge of the impossible scale of his talent: that no matter how excited you are to see him play, it is not – and it can never be – enough. 

Photograph by Robin Alam/ISI Photos via Getty Images