When the greatest player in a country's history walks away, it is difficult to talk about positives. When that player is Lionel Messi, it feels almost inappropriate.
Messi has left Argentina after losing a World Cup final, but that defeat takes nothing away from his international career. Nor does the fact that he lost two of the three World Cup finals he played in. Three finals. Three. There are footballing nations that have spent generations waiting to reach one. Messi played in three of them and won one. Add two Copa Americas and the Finalissima and there is not much of an argument left to have.
So, yes, there is sadness. There has to be. Argentina without Messi will look strange for a while, perhaps for a long while. Football has spent two decades getting used to Messi playing for Argentina and now everyone has to get used to Argentina playing without him. But different does not automatically mean worse.
Argentina no longer have an obvious answer — and neither do their opponents
Messi could decide a match against anyone, at any moment. Argentina have produced an absurd amount of attacking talent during his international career, but eventually almost everything came back to him. That was understandable. When you have Messi, you build around Messi. Not doing so would have been the stranger decision. There was a cost, though. Argentina's opponents knew where the game was going. Stop Messi — or at least make his life as difficult as possible — and you had taken a huge step towards stopping Argentina.
The more frustrating problem was what happened to the players around him. Outstanding footballers from Europe's biggest clubs would arrive with the national team and sometimes seem to shrink. Players capable of deciding games themselves became supporting actors, looking for Messi almost by instinct. Give him the ball and let him solve it. For years Argentina could not find a coach capable of making those two things coexist: Messi's enormous influence and the individual quality of everybody around him.
Then Lionel Scaloni arrived. It is easy to forget just how unlikely that appointment once looked. Jorge Sampaoli was dismissed after the disastrous 2018 World Cup and Scaloni was initially handed the job on an interim basis. He was not supposed to become the architect of an era. He was there while Argentina searched for someone else. They never needed to.
Scaloni did what his predecessors could not. Argentina remained a team built around Messi, but they stopped behaving like a collection of players waiting for Messi to rescue them. Rodrigo De Paul ran, Emiliano Martinez became a personality as much as a goalkeeper, Cristian Romero defended on the edge, Julian Alvarez pressed and scored, Angel Di Maria continued to deliver in the biggest moments. Everyone had a role beyond simply getting the ball to No.10. The team still served Messi, of course, but Messi served the team too. That was the breakthrough.
Scaloni gave Messi the ending Argentina had waited for
In some ways, Scaloni's arrival was Messi's reward for everything that had come before it. By 2018, Messi had still not won a senior trophy with Argentina. He had lost four major finals and his relationship with international football had become almost painful. He announced his retirement after the 2016 Copa America final defeat against Chile before reversing the decision. After Argentina went out of the 2018 World Cup in the last 16, he stepped away again and, at the time, another comeback was far from guaranteed.
What followed changed the entire story of Messi and Argentina. Under Scaloni came the Copa America, the Finalissima, the World Cup and another Copa America. Messi went from a player whose international career was constantly, and often unfairly, measured by what he had not won to a captain who had won everything available to him.
Now Messi's part of the story is finished, but there is another major question for Argentina: whether Scaloni's is coming to an end as well. After the 2026 World Cup final, the coach openly admitted that he was considering his future.
“I have an idea of what I want to do: I will fulfil my contract and continue until December, and then I will probably stop. I need to think about everything carefully. I don't know if I can do something as great as we did before. To continue, you have to find that energy again, reset and build a new team. Repeating what we achieved will be incredibly difficult.”
The key phrase is “build a new team”, because that is exactly where Argentina are now. Messi is gone and there is no point pretending his absence can somehow be covered by moving another player into the No.10 shirt. This is not about finding a replacement. It is about building an Argentina side that no longer needs one player to occupy the centre of its footballing universe.
There is life after Messi
The temptation will inevitably be to search for the next Messi. Argentina should resist it. There is no next Messi and there may never be one. What they do have is an excellent group of players who are either entering or still firmly inside their prime. Julian Alvarez is 26, Enzo Fernandez is 25, Alexis Mac Allister is 27, Lautaro Martinez is 29, while Lisandro Martinez and Cristian Romero are both 28. This is not an ageing squad staring at a rebuild from zero. Much of the spine of the next Argentina team is already there.
Behind them comes perhaps the most interesting part of Argentina's future. Nico Paz is the obvious name. At 21, he has already established himself as one of Serie A's outstanding young players with Como. Of Argentina's emerging generation, he is probably the player whose style most naturally invites comparisons with Messi: left-footed, creative, comfortable between the lines and capable of producing something that was not there a second earlier. The comparison is inevitable, but the responsibility does not have to be. Argentina do not need to turn Paz into the new Messi and, in fact, one of the advantages of the post-Messi era may be that they no longer need to make anyone the centre of everything.
There are other options. Maximo Perrone, 23, has developed alongside Paz at Como and already understands how to operate underneath him in midfield, a relationship that could eventually be transferred to the national side. Santiago Castro is another. Still only 21, the striker earned a €36 million move to Roma after two impressive seasons with Bologna. Alvarez and Lautaro are nowhere near finished, but Argentina are already producing the forwards who will eventually challenge them.
And this is where life without Messi becomes interesting rather than simply frightening. For most of the past two decades, every opponent preparing to face Argentina knew where the greatest danger was coming from. The problem was stopping it. Now there is no such obvious target. The threat can come from Alvarez running behind, Lautaro inside the box, Mac Allister arriving from midfield, Enzo controlling the game or Paz finding space between the lines. Argentina have lost the greatest individual weapon they have ever had, but they may also become a less predictable team because of it.
Argentina must keep the other Lionel
Argentina will not collapse simply because Messi has gone. The talent remains, another generation is coming and many of the players who helped build the country's most successful side in decades are still young enough to lead the next one. The bigger uncertainty is the man on the touchline.
Scaloni has already proved he can build a team around Messi. His next challenge would be completely different: building one without him. There is a strong argument that nobody is better placed to do it. Scaloni has the authority that comes with winning everything, he knows the players, understands the peculiar demands of international football and has already shown an ability to change his team without destroying its identity. Most importantly, he understands what made this Argentina successful beyond Messi.
Replacing Lionel Messi is impossible, but Argentina do not have to compound his departure by losing Lionel Scaloni at exactly the same time. One Lionel has already gone. Argentina should do everything they can to keep the other.
Published by Patrick Jane
02.09.2026