Could the goal Lionel Messi scored today against Egypt really be the second-greatest goal in World Cup history?
Yes.
You heard that correctly.
It did not win a World Cup final. It did not even send Argentina into a final. But it did something else, something almost impossible to measure.
It took a team that appeared to have no chance of survival in the 85th minute, staring at a stunning elimination against a very good Egyptian side led by a genuine global superstar in Mohamed Salah, and gave the world hope.
That was the moment.
Messi seemed to leap twice above the ground after the ball went in. For a second, he did not look like a 39-year-old footballer nearing the end of the greatest career the sport has ever seen. He looked weightless.
He had finally beaten an outstanding Egyptian goalkeeper who had already produced a string of remarkable saves.
Then came the rush. Julián Álvarez. Enzo Fernández.
And behind them, the hard, uncompromising Lisandro Martínez.
Just look at Martínez’s face at the moment he embraces the rest. How these men held eachother in the huddle like they are clinching to dear life. Argentina lives to fight. That expression of Joy/relief embodied in an almost agonized gaze of pure emotion tells you almost everything about what the goal meant. It was not merely celebration. It was the face of a team that had been looking into the abyss and saved by their savior.
Watching with my five-year-old son
I watched the match with my five-year-old son.
In a strange way, this may have been the first football match he had ever truly agreed to watch for an extended period of time. We began watching around the 70th minute, when Argentina were trailing 1-0. Then it became 2-0.
And suddenly the possibility became real: Messi might be going home.
There was something almost tragic in the thought that the first match my son had really sat down and tried to follow could end with the player he loves most being eliminated at an early stage.
I had to explain it to him in the simplest possible terms.
“Messi has five minutes to score,” I told him, “or he goes home and the red team wins”
And then the goal came. A scream exploded out of me. Unfortunately, we were watching the match in a library. So that was slightly awkward.
My son was happy. I was overwhelmed. And for one instant, the entire emotional weight of football and history seemed to collapse into a single shot.
From 2-0 down to immortality
What Messi did was extraordinary. He kept the defending world champions alive.
He climbed once again to the top of the tournament’s scoring charts.
He completed the emotional peak of a historic comeback that saw Argentina turn 2-0 into 2-2 in only six minutes. And in doing so, he transformed the match into the greatest game of this World Cup so far. But perhaps he did something even bigger. At 39 years old, the greatest player in the history of football produced the defining moment of this tournament. Think about that. At 39. With Argentina virtually eliminated. With his career potentially minutes away from ending. With billions of people watching. Messi released that strike, beat a goalkeeper who had seemed unbeatable, and detonated an explosion of emotion around the world. That is why this goal belongs in a different category. The greatest World Cup goals are not simply the most technically beautiful. They are not always the longest-range shots, the greatest dribbles or even the goals scored in finals. Sometimes greatness lies in the weight of the moment. And few moments have ever carried more.
‘Those are tears of joy’
After the match, Messi cried.
I turned to my son and said:
“Messi is crying.” My son immediately answered: “He is happy. You can cry from happiness too.” And that was it. That was the entire story.
Messi cried because the career of the greatest footballer of all time could have ended in that moment. Argentina were standing on the edge of elimination. The script was collapsing. And then he wrote another page. Earlier, when Argentina seemed certain to go out, my son had asked me a wonderfully innocent question:
“So what, if he loses, they won’t sell Messi shirts anymore?”
Now everybody knows the answer.
They will. Of course they will.
Because Messi is still here. And somehow, impossibly, the story is still being written.
