With Messi and Yamal, the final feels very much like a relay race

When we saw that photo, we were just discovering Yamal. It was two years ago; Spain had won the European Championship and we wanted to know everything about that 17-year-old who was making a name for himself with extraordinary technical flair. We saw it and, as we learnt more about him, we realised that his good fortune, for a start, lay in having been mentored by Leo Messi when he was still a child. The photo dates from 2007 and was taken for a charity calendar: Yamal’s family had won a prize draw in the Rocafonda neighbourhood of Mataró. The prize was a photograph with a Barça footballer. They were paired with Messi, who was twenty years old, with long hair, and seemed a little unsure of how to hold a baby, but showed great promise on the pitch. Yamal was six months old and was sitting in a plastic basin in the visitors’ changing room at Camp Nou. Football produces coincidences; time turns them into prophecies: nineteen years on, one is tempted to think that no other player drawn at random could have been chosen for Yamal. The twenty-year-old of that time is now thirty-nine and has taken Argentina by the hand right from the start because he dreams of winning a second consecutive World Cup title, having brought the team back to a level it hadn’t reached since Maradona wore the Albiceleste’s number ten shirt. The youngster from 2007, on the other hand, still promises twenty more years of brilliance, but in the meantime he wants to win again because Europe isn’t enough when you have the whole world at your disposal.

Messi and Yamal represent Argentina and Spain; they are the World Cup final. They are playing to win and perhaps also to pass the baton. Football loves its heirs because they prevent a void from forming: when a champion is about to leave, we immediately look for another with the same shirt number, the same foot, and, if possible, the same trajectory. Starting with a photo helps: when Messi wasn’t yet Messi and Yamal, quite simply, wasn’t yet anything. Until today.

Even the coaches in the final were, for a certain period, not the sort of coaches you’d expect to be in a final. And perhaps, for that long period, no one ever thought they could become just that. Luis de la Fuente joined the Spanish Football Federation in 2013. He wasn’t the man chosen to rebuild the national game. He started out in the youth setup. Under-19s, Under-21s, the Olympic squad. He worked his way through the Federation one tournament at a time and got to know many of Spain’s players before they became famous, wealthy and indispensable. When, in December 2022, he was handed the senior national team – vacated not by just anyone but by Luis Enrique – it seemed like an internal appointment, not the radical change that was needed. He didn’t say a word: he simply moved offices within the Federation and took charge of a generation he didn’t need to get to know, having guided them that far himself. With Spain, he went on to win the Nations League and the European Championship, leading a team – built in part on knowledge and trust – to the World Cup final. Lionel Scaloni’s arrival was even less fanfare-filled. In 2018, Argentina had exited the World Cup in Russia with the feeling of being a team that had come to a sorry end. Jorge Sampaoli had left, Messi had distanced himself from the national team, and the Football Association needed someone to organise two friendlies. Scaloni was already part of the coaching staff. He had little experience as a coach and none as a head coach. They entrusted him with the team on an interim basis – an arrangement that usually comes with an expiry date. He was meant to take the helm whilst Argentina searched for a permanent manager. But Scaloni acted like a permanent manager. He brought Messi back into the national team, but didn’t simply hand him the team: he built a team in which Messi could be happy again. He started out as an interim manager, then they realised that perhaps he could be the man to lead the revolution. We are now in the eighth year of his interim spell, or perhaps the temporary solution has become an era in its own right: two Copa América titles, the 2022 final and the World Cup in Qatar have followed. One man waited almost ten years within the Football Association. The other was supposed to stay for just two matches.

In between, another photo that nobody took: the one from when De la Fuente was one of Scaloni’s instructors on the coaching course in Spain. The Argentine manager regards him as a mentor. On Sunday, the pupil will arrive having already won a World Cup; the mentor will be trying to win his own. This one has the protagonists in reverse: there is De la Fuente, the more senior mentor, and Scaloni, the pupil who was the first to reach the pinnacle. In the first, there are Messi, the great champion, and Yamal, the youngster coming up behind him.

Stories that intersect and become a single narrative. Or rather, a final. Or, indeed, four different ways of navigating time. Messi stretches it out. Every tournament should be his last, yet it becomes yet another opportunity to add something to a career that seemed complete but still has more to say. Yamal shortens it. He arrives before the expected age; at the European Championship, he could play extra time with a permit to work past midnight. He is nineteen, and we see him ready to replace what is perhaps the greatest footballer of his era. De la Fuente builds him up. Years of youth squads, minor tournaments, players watched as they grew up, waiting for a promotion that was perhaps not even promised. Scaloni transforms him. Two friendlies turn into a Copa América, then a World Cup, then another final. The provisional becomes, day by day, the definitive. Now they’re all in the same place. But if we’d put them all together in the same room twenty years ago, no one could have imagined any of this: no one seemed to harbour the ambition of finding themselves, one day, competing in the World Cup. In New York, at three in the afternoon.