Lionel Messi Leads Argentina to Victory with Hat Trick
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Lionel Scaloni has seen almost everything this sport can throw at a man. Titles, pressure, glory, failure. He has lifted the World Cup as a manager. He won La Liga and the Copa del Rey in a ferocious era with Deportivo La Coruña. He has lived football at its highest temperature.
And yet, on a humid Tuesday night in the Midwest, as Lionel Messi walked off after another night that bent history in his direction, Scaloni simply broke.
He hugged his captain, clung to him for a moment, then the emotion spilled over. Tears. In the first match of a tournament Argentina expects to stretch to eight games, their World Cup defense only just underway, the coach who has seen it all suddenly looked overwhelmed.
That is Messi’s reach. It does not stop at the stands, where tens of thousands travel and pay and scream just to watch him glide across a field. It runs straight through his teammates, through his staff, through the man charged with managing him.
“I know he has a group of friends by his side, people who are going to give their all for him,” Scaloni said. “They see him as if he were a god and also see him as though he were a dude from the neighborhood.
“It’s difficult to explain what he transmits to the group. I could be here an hour trying to explain, but you’ve got to be there to see what is felt. The atmosphere, the aura generated being by his side. That’s daily.”
Daily, yes. But Tuesday was not ordinary.
Messi scored a hat trick in a 3-0 win over Algeria, dragging the game into his orbit the way only he can. He forced the night to belong to him, even after Kylian Mbappé had tried to steal the show with a double earlier in the day.
Three goals pushed Messi past Ronaldo of Brazil and into a tie with Miroslav Klose for the most goals in men’s World Cup history. Another line in a record book that is running out of space for his name.
And still, he refused to linger on it.
“Honestly, no,” Messi said when asked if he dwells on the numbers. “It’s an honor to be there for what it means, to be alongside Klose. Ronaldo is there, too. I don’t think it means anything. Mbappé scored two today. Ultimately, it’s a statistic and nothing more. It’s an honor to be able to compete with them. For me, Ronaldo was a very great one, and he’s not first, so ... it shows what a statistic does.”
His answer fit the performance. The numbers glow — three goals, another record chased down, another legend caught — but the real story lived in everything wrapped around those finishes.
Messi’s influence seeped into every phase. He took a match that Algeria’s Ibrahim Maza later insisted “wasn’t too bad” from their side and ripped it open.
They could not live with “Messi things.”
Asked to explain that phrase, Maza simply shrugged it off. “I don’t think I need to explain it. I think you just need to watch the game, and then you know what ‘Messi things’ means.”
Everyone in the building did.
The determination to start and finish a move himself, even when surrounded. The way he can disappear in plain sight, invisible to defenders who are literally staring at him. That sudden, downhill acceleration from midfield that still shocks you, even at his age. The slice of fortune that seemed to travel with him when a foul that might have drawn a card instead went unpunished and the attack rolled on.
This is what separates him from the names he now sits beside in the record books. Klose, Ronaldo, Mbappé — all giants. Messi, though, reshapes games. He doesn’t just score in them.
He turned a balanced contest into a mismatch. He dictated when Argentina sped up and when they took the air out of the ball. Every time Algeria thought they had the rhythm, he snatched it away.
Somewhere inside all that, there was another layer of emotion. Messi later mentioned that it had been a difficult day for Scaloni because of something that happened away from the pitch. The details stayed private, but the reaction on the touchline made more sense. This was not just a coach watching his star. It was a man clinging to a familiar source of joy on a hard day.
The wider concern coming into the tournament had been Messi’s body. An injury at Inter Miami had raised doubts, whispers about minutes, about load, about how much he had left to give at this stage of his career.
He answered them in the most Messi way possible: by deciding the game, then downplaying everything.
His teammates, the ones Scaloni says see him both as a god and as a neighbor, fed off that aura. They pressed, they chased, they played with the edge of a group that knows it is defending something precious. This is not a team basking in its 2022 glory. It is one that understands a second straight title will demand more.
Because the expectation around Argentina is ruthless. A hat trick in the opener is a dream start, but no one inside that dressing room believes this can be the high point of the tournament. It cannot be. The bar, set in Qatar, is too high now.
Messi knows it. He shut down any talk of destiny beyond the next step.
“This national team is here to compete. We never get ahead of ourselves. We go game by game. This national team, the group keeps showing that it’s not relaxing, that it will compete the same way no matter who the opponent is — sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always competing,” he said. “There’s no doubt. We’re going to fight until we can’t.”
The next fight comes on June 22, against Austria in North Texas. Messi has already moved his mind there. No grand speeches about legacies, no declarations about back-to-back titles. Just the next 90 minutes.
For Argentina, the equation is brutally simple. If they keep that edge, if the supporting cast maintains this level or climbs even higher, and if Messi stays healthy and brilliant, Scaloni will almost certainly find himself crying again before this is over.
And if that happens, he will not be the only one.
