Argentina won the World Cup 2022 on Sunday, taking its third title and ending the long wait that had hovered over Lionel Messi and this team for years. The victory completed a tournament held in Qatar’s winter, with Argentina finally turning a difficult month into the last word in international soccer.
The reason readers are coming back to this now is simple: this was the World Cup that kept shifting under Argentina’s feet before it ended in triumph. The team entered Qatar on a 36-game unbeaten run, then saw that streak snapped by a 2-1 loss to Saudi Arabia in its opener. From there, the path to the trophy looked less like a march and more like a series of adjustments that Lionel Scaloni kept making until the side settled into itself.
Scaloni never locked Argentina into one shape. He used 4-4-2, 4-3-3 and 5-3-2 during the tournament, then returned to 4-3-3 in the final. That flexibility mattered because the coach kept changing the pieces as well as the formation. Enzo Fernandez came on just before the hour mark against Mexico in a holding midfield role and soon became part of the answer. Alexis Mac Allister grew into a regular alongside him, while Julian Alvarez replaced Lautaro Martinez and gave Argentina a different edge up front.
Those changes were not cosmetic. They helped steady a team that had opened the tournament in shock and made the rest of the bracket look more manageable than it had any right to be. In the semifinal, Alvarez scored twice in a 3-0 win over Croatia, a result that showed Argentina could still play with speed and control when the stakes were highest. The title was not won by momentum alone. It was won because Scaloni kept finding the right combination at the right time, with Messi at the center of it all.
There was also a larger weight to the win. Argentina had not lifted the trophy since 1986, and the country arrived in Qatar carrying that history as much as it carried the unbeaten streak. Messi, 35, was the player around whom the team was built, and the final left one of the sport’s biggest careers attached to one of its biggest prizes. What it did not do was answer every question about how he wanted that career to be remembered. It did, however, put Argentina back on top of the World Cup in the clearest way possible: with a third title, and with Messi still at the center of the story.
