​Who wants this World Cup the most? It’s hard to pinpoint with certainty. Who needs it the most? That answer seems plainly Argentina. After Argentina’s World Cup victory over Egypt, their coach and captain shared an emotionally charged embrace, a moment that spoke volumes. You could sense the desperation in Lionel Messi’s tears after their tense comeback win over Egypt, and you could hear Lionel Scaloni’s voice cracking through the post-match interview, admitting he couldn’t even bear to watch his players or the travelling fans because the emotion was overwhelming. A mere round-of-16 triumph felt like lifting the trophy itself.
No team in the United States this summer carries the weight of expectation and feeling quite like Argentina, though it’s fair to say few nations invest as much in World Cups as this rugged corner of South America. Football has long been inseparable from Argentine culture, such that the journeys of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi—from troubled youths to near-mythic symbols—have saturated the national psyche. The Argentine Dream is not a modern notion but a living legend.
Maradona and Messi are central pillars of Argentina’s national identity, their World Cup triumphs perhaps the country’s greatest international achievements after the sport’s invention. And so, in Argentina, these tournaments carry everything they can. As always at the World Cup, the traveling Argentine fans will craft another song, one that sticks in your head for weeks. This year, the chant “The Fourth Star,” sung to honor the team as their players cried in Atlanta, crescendos with the refrain: “For the Falklands, for Diego, For Leo’s last World Cup.” It’s a succinct summary of the three core elements of modern Argentine pride.
Even as inflation surges and the country remains deeply divided politically, with millions living in poverty, Argentina continues to draw hope from Messi’s magic. He fulfilled a mythic promise as dramatic as Maradona’s own arc in the years following the Falklands War. The Falkland Islands, or Las Malvinas, persist as a nationalist symbol in Argentina: students learn that they are part of the country, maps depict them within Argentine sovereignty, and numerous places bear names connected to the Islands despite them lying far from Port Stanley and despite the overwhelming majority of Falkland Islanders preferring to remain British. This emotional and historical backdrop feeds into the World Cup fervor, shaping a national narrative where sport becomes a conduit for broader identity and aspiration.