Who wants this World Cup the most?
Hard to say, isn’t it?
Who needs this World Cup the most?
Well, that’s quite plainly Argentina.
To say you can feel the desperation doesn’t even quite cut it. You could see it in the tears flooding Lionel Messi’s eyes after their heart-pounding comeback win over Egypt. You could hear it as Lionel Scaloni blubbed his way through the post-match interview, warning he couldn’t even look at his players or the travelling fans serenading their side because it was too much emotion for him. A round-of-16 win was celebrated like the trophy itself.
No team in the United States this summer feels so emotionally charged, but then again few nations put as much importance into World Cups as this jagged corner of South America.
It is almost impossible to separate football from Argentine culture because they are so deeply intertwined, but Diego Maradona and Messi’s ascension from defective street urchins to become almost holy figures are now a big part of the national psyche. The Argentine Dream.
The World Cups those two won might be, with the greatest of respects to the inventor of the ballpoint pen, Argentina’s greatest international achievement. And so cyclically, these tournaments mean everything to them.
As happens at every World Cup, the travelling Argentine fans will come up with a song and it will be stuck in your head for an entire month. This time, ‘The Fourth Star’, the terrace song being belted out at those weeping Argentina stars in Atlanta reaches its crescendo with the line: “For the Falklands, for Diego, For Leo’s last World Cup.”
Which just about sums up the three pillars of modern day Argentine pride.
Inflation is rampant and the country is deeply polarised politically, with at least 13 million people living below the poverty line, but this is a country that can always look to Leo and have hope. Messi made their dreams come true, somehow following Maradona’s own mythological arc that played out so emotionally in the years immediately following the Falklands War.
Las Malvinas remain a nationalist symbol. Kids are taught in school that they are part of Argentina, they are always depicted on maps of Argentina as being part of sovereign territory and things are named after them all over the country. Three clubs in the top two divisions have stadiums that translate to “the Argentine Falklands Stadium” despite being over 1000 miles from Port Stanley – and despite 99.8 per cent of Falkland Islanders voting to remain part of the United Kingdom.
Irrespective of historic territorial claims and their validity, invoking the Malvinas is just one example of how the Argentine fans have cranked up the patriotism to make this campaign so emotionally charged.
At least part of that is desperation.
As acknowledged in labelling a potential fourth World Cup as “Leo’s last” in this summer’s soundtrack, the pint-sized genius will almost certainly not make it to 2030, and he’s nearly been knocked out twice already.
But when Messi has kicked his last ball for Argentina, this is a country that has to look to the future and find another plan. And there isn’t one.
The chances of finding a third undersized wizard with fair claim to be the greatest footballer of all time are remarkably slim. Even more so as years of corruption at the Argentine Football Association under Julio Grondona – who infamously asked for the Falklands in return for voting for England to host the 2018 World Cup – diverted tens of millions into Swiss bank accounts that should have been used for developing youth football and building infrastructure.
So if this feels like the Last Chance Saloon that is because it is. It’s not about want for Argentina, it’s about need.
Simultaneously, is it crazy to ask whether this iteration of Argentina might not actually be that good? They have a lot of good players, no doubt, but at times they appear to have no plan in the event that Messi doesn’t decide to create some magic. As one viral comment observed of their feisty if unconvincing style: “Argentina are basically the ‘what if we gave Atletico Madrid Lionel Messi?’ experiment.”
A team that runs on emotion has won with emotion in their last two games. The Cape Verde scare and the Egypt remontada both come with their own negatives but Argentina also know that whatever happens to them in these next few games, however many there may be, they can gut it out and claw their way back.
To say they’re fighters doesn’t seem sufficient. It comes from somewhere much deeper.
Beware the World Cup’s most emotionally charged team.
