Lionel Scaloni: the story behind the reconstruction of this team, world finalist with the genius Lionel Messi

He is the youngest coach in the World Cup. He also the only candidate from South America. And above all, the grand finalist. At 44, when some of us haven’t even opened a bank account, lionel scaloni He has the mission of understanding how the planets align during seven games and that his team can win the long-awaited third world cup. He has already completed six, with a stratosphere Messi. One more job for a wise man like Copernicus than for a soccer coach.

What did you do well to get here, to the Qatar 2022 final after beating Croatia 3-0 with absolute authority? First thing, recover Messi. She didn’t teach him anything because at 35, the Flea knows every word in the dictionary. She won it all. What looked like not having in the bag -he stressed it seemed- was this unanimous leadership over his peers. This football complicity that now allows him to see him as a total genius, not as a unique savior. The journalist Juan Pablo Varsky explained it well in the DirecTV broadcast: “It is no longer the Argentina in which his teammates wait to see Messi do everything. It is the team that accompanies what Messi does”. It is true. Julián Álvarez’s second goal against Croatia -the final 3-0- is proof. One knows that Messi can control the ball as if it had a magnet and take it home. He did it at 11, at 20; he does it at 35. But what is there to be, accompany, follow. And that happens today.

-Brief prehistory of a feat-

Imagine what it’s like to assume the national team of the country where Messi was born and for Messi to resign because they don’t want him. It happened in mid-2020. Crisis in the Argentine team. What happened next? Lionel Scaloni did not go to beg him to return after the exhausting Copa América Centenario, he waited for the sadness to calm down and then he spoke to him, in a video call so decisive that Argentine critics compare it to the meeting between Bilardo and Maradona in Barcelona, ​​prior to Mexico 86. “Hello, I’m Scaloni. We wanted to talk to you with Pablo (Aimar), ”the technician recently recalled the brief chat on the iPhone. “We told him: ‘We know that maybe it’s better that you don’t come yet’, in chorus, in the voices of who was going to be his coach in Qatar 2022 and who was -Aimar- his idol as a child. In that simple exercise, caring for the beaten and at the same time anointing the chosen one, Scaloni recovered more than a footballer, a man.

That today he has 4 goals and 3 goal assists, decisive in six games of this Argentina finalist.

Then, he chose a system that increases the production of his team (4-3-3) and was absolutely permeable to turn the shock of the debut against Arabia into new electricity: he took out Lea Paredes and brought in Enzo Fernández, he changed Lautaro Martínez for Julián Álvarez -the Burruchaga of this cup- and gave La Pulga more freedom after a positional change in which the sacrificed was Papu Gómez. It seems like a simple name game but it is millionaires chess. Those three, Paredes, Lautaro and Gómez are part of the select group called “Los amigos de Messi”. Something like the Untouchables, the Thread, the Ring.

This is how he rebuilt his team. That’s how it came to today. With an oriental serenity and a coaching staff that exudes Argentina (Samuel, Aimar, Ayala), they are one game away from winning the World Cup again for Argentina. If he does, it will be Menotti, Bilardo, Sabella. If he wins it, it will be Gardel.