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In 2007, a 20-year-old Lionel Messi posed for a Barcelona charity calendar, gently bathing a baby in a plastic tub. The baby’s family had won a UNICEF lottery. No one thought of the picture again for 17 years.
The baby was Lamine Yamal.
You could write fiction for a decade and never come up with it. On Sunday at the World Cup final in New Jersey, the greatest player of all time faces the teenager who many believe will inherit the title, and there is photographic evidence that Messi literally held him first. Both came through La Masia. Both wore the No. 19 at Barcelona before switching to the 10. The football gods stopped being subtle a long time ago.
Somehow the two teams are as compelling as the two stars.
Start with the story, because there is almost none. Spain and Argentina have met once at a World Cup, a group stage match in 1966, with Argentina winning 2-1 behind a Luis Artime brace. They have never met in a knockout match. The all-time series is deadlocked at six wins apiece. This year’s Finalissima was meant to wrap things up in March before it was cancelled, so instead the reigning European and South American champions will meet for the first time in World Cup finals history with the biggest trophy in sport on the table. Fine. It also works.
The trails couldn’t look more different. Spain dismantled France 2-0, making the tournament’s most feared attack look ordinary. This is the best team in the world, and more importantly, the team with the clearest identity in the sport. In an era where so many teams push and build in the same way, Spain still look unmistakably Spain. That’s worth something in a one-off final.
And the names driving it are not the ones anyone predicted. Yamal has one goal all tournament, scored back on matchday two, which would have sounded like a crisis in May and instead describes a finalist. Mikel Oyarzabal leads the team in scoring and buried the penalty that broke France. Rodri again looked like the 2024 Ballon d’Or winner as he went about his business in midfield. Behind him, the wall: Pau Cubarsí and Aymeric Laporte have conceded once in seven games, Unai Simón set a World Cup record clean sheet and the full-backs have been a cheat code at both ends. Marc Cucurella erased Kylian Mbappé on 90 minutes, while Pedro Porro scored the nail in the coffin.
Argentina, meanwhile, have stumbled through the knockouts like a heavyweight who keeps rising: 3-2 over Cape Verde, 3-2 over Egypt, 3-1 over Switzerland in extra time and now 2-1 over England after falling behind in the 85th minute. No team had ever scored more stoppage-time winners in a single World Cup. Argentina now has. At some point “lucky” stops being the word and “inevitable” takes over.
Albiceleste’s engine is a 39-year-old. Messi assisted both goals against England, has scored eight times in the tournament and continues to rewrite the record books on a weekly basis. His legs have aged. His brain doesn’t.
And Argentina showed England exactly what Spain should expect. The first 30 minutes in Atlanta were a street fight: eight fouls and zero shots on goal at the first hydration break, bodies down everywhere and rhythm nowhere to be found. Thomas Tuchel’s England took a 55th-minute lead through Anthony Gordon and then sat on it, inviting wave after wave until the dam broke. Enzo Fernández bent one in from distance. Lautaro Martínez headed in the winner on the stroke of half-time after a fantastic right-footed Messi cross.
Tuchel has come under fire for his second-half tactics, and deservedly so, but here’s the warning for Sunday: Argentina will try to drag Spain down the same alley.
That’s really the whole final. Spain will have a game with order. Argentina will have a game in chaos. A team has conceded a single goal. The other refuses to die.
And in the middle of it all, a man and the baby he once bathed are reunited with the world watching.
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