The most committed of Leo Messi devotees could scarcely have predicted this: their champion just one more thrust from embroidering his career in eternal World Cup gold. Before him stands the man who would be king, Kylian Mbappé, his team-mate at Paris Saint-Germain and the one player with the celebrity muscle to script an ending equal in scale and force.
The hosts can’t lose. The World Cup has its Hollywood finale. Worth £200bn of any state budget. Four weeks on from the first kick at Qatar 2022, when the tournament was engulfed in human rights issues and still reeling from Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s alphabet of feelings speech, we are talking only about the football. Qatar could not have wished for a better outcome had it “arranged” the final.
This kind of duel is as old as the written word, the ultimate in conflict resolution, the decider as depicted by Homer 2,700 years ago when Achilles dragged the body of Hector around Troy’s city walls. The landscape has changed. No chariots at Lusail. Yet the sense of an epic conclusion resonates in the way it appeared to the ancient Greek poet, who gave us the literary footprint to frame our ideas of the world, to examine the order and structure of things, to determine right and wrong, to capture the meaning of life.
What is Messi versus Mbappé if not Achilles versus Hector distilled into 90 minutes, a vivid passion play set before a global audience to determine who is the daddy of all things? Thus the presence of the game’s most emblematic footballers, one at the end of his career, the other in the early phases of his, has a mythical dimension. Its meaning stretches beyond the confines of the pitch and into the wider public consciousness.
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For the citizens of Argentina, Messi has acquired god-like status, his deification measured in the numbers gathered in the streets and squares of Buenos Aires, Rosario and Cordoba as he dragged his team from the abyss of defeat to Saudi Arabia towards glorification against France on Sunday. Further evidence of this was provided by the television reporter who intercepted Messi after the semi-final win over Croatia and conducted not an interview but a confessional in which she expressed gratitude on behalf of the nation for his contribution to public life.
He had, she said, in the leadership he had shown, in the celestial heights he had reached, made the people feel proud to be Argentinian irrespective of the results. “You resonated with Argentinians, you made your mark on everyone’s life,” she told him in her remarkable broadcast genuflection.
Mbappé, on the other hand, refused to engage with reporters after France’s victory over Morocco. At 23, he is already a World Cup winner and, full of the arrogance of youth, flush with disdain. Reporters thrust their mics in his direction. “It’s Messi next in the final,” they shouted, trying to hook their fish. On he walked, imperiously, with a look that screamed: “So what?”
At the start of the tournament Mbappé topped the list of VIPs. Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi were all important ticket-sellers with stories to tell, of course, but not quite as billboard big as Mbappé, who in his vibrancy and his youth was Qatar 2022’s aspirational reference point. Four weeks on, Messi has usurped his magnetic pull, leaving Mbappé with ground to make up in this captivating final.
Mbappé has erupted in moments, not least with the two smashed goals to pummel Poland in the last 16 and the turn of foot and dribble that cracked open the Moroccan defence to seal France’s place in the final. But Messi has done that and more. He is at the centre of a redemption story following the defeat by Saudi Arabia. He took sole responsibility for Argentina’s response, the tournament following a narrative arc that married Messi’s redemption vis-à-vis a public sworn to Diego Maradona, with the team’s rise towards a third World Cup triumph.
That Messi might end his career a World Cup winner alongside Maradona has become the dominant theme, one to which we are all connected, not just the people of Argentina. Messi has become part of us in a way Mbappé has not.
He is in our hearts and minds. This is Mbappé’s great challenge, to project upon the stage the power dynamic of Paris, where he and not Messi is the star around which the PSG constellation is formed.
Mbappé has it in him to thrill in a way few ever have. The best of him is still before us. Perhaps by the end of his career he might have bent the light more than Messi. By then, of course, the next supernova will be among us, forcing yet another recalibration in the endless cycle of deification.
Messi has been at it for the best part of 18 years, making his Barcelona debut in 2004, winning the first of four Champions League titles in 2006, and now is at the threshold of football’s Holy Grail, a World Cup winner’s medal.
After five World Cups he shall not be seen again in this setting. It would constitute the happiest of happy endings, a beautifully rounded completion of one of the greatest sporting stories ever told.
It is for Mbappé to say no to all of this, to make Sunday his fable and Frenchmen of us all. If only for a day.
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