There’s defending a World Cup title, and then there’s whatever Lionel Messi did on Tuesday night in Kansas City. The 38-year-old captain produced his first-ever World Cup hat-trick, tied an all-time tournament record, and somehow made headlines for crying before the headlines were even about the goals. Argentina’s 3-0 demolition of Algeria wasn’t just a winning start to their title defense — it was a night that belonged entirely to one man.
The opener came early and it came emotional. In the 17th minute, Messi latched onto a clever feed from Inter Miami teammate Rodrigo De Paul and buried it. As the celebrations kicked off,
Messi used his own jersey to wipe tears from his eyes, a moment so raw it briefly overshadowed the goal itself. Cameras caught every second of it, and within minutes it was everywhere on X, with fan accounts like Messismo posting the clip captioned “Estamos todos igual” — we’re all the same — as the moment rippled across timelines.
Asked about it afterward, Messi didn’t dodge the question, but he also didn’t make it about football. “Why did I cry? It was something completely unrelated to football,” he said, adding that he’d gone through some difficult, complicated days before the tournament. He thanked his teammates and the Argentine staff for standing by him through it, then went back to doing what he’s done for two decades: breaking the sport’s record books.
Algeria, to their credit, didn’t roll over. They actually had a goal of their own ruled out earlier in the action, and for stretches of the first half it looked like a contest. But Argentina were simply playing a different game. Messi’s tap-in goal — described by ESPN as a long-range screamer for the opener, followed by a more straightforward finish — extended the lead in the 60th minute, pouncing on a loose ball in the box. By that point, Algeria’s defense had no answers left.
The third goal, in the 76th minute, was the kind of moment Messi seems to manufacture on command: a composed, curling effort into the bottom corner that needed no second look from the linesman.
It was enough to send him off the pitch to a standing ovation from a crowd of over 69,000, tilted heavily in Argentina’s favor, as he was subbed off late in the second half having done all his work for the night.
The numbers attached to the performance are almost absurd. The hat-trick brought Messi to 16 World Cup goals, tying Miroslav Klose’s all-time tournament scoring record, and made him, at 38, the oldest player ever to score a hat-trick at a World Cup. It also marked the fifth consecutive World Cup match in which Messi has found the net, and made him just the second player ever to score across five different World Cup editions. Strangely fitting, the whole show came exactly twenty years to the day since Messi made his World Cup debut back in 2006 — a match in which, fittingly, he also scored.
Algeria coach Vladimir Petkovic summed up the night best, conceding simply that class is permanent and that Messi has the luxury of an entire team built to serve his brilliance.
Argentina now sit comfortably atop Group J, and if this opener was any indication, Messi isn’t just defending a trophy this summer — he’s rewriting where his name sits in the history of the sport itself.
Man of the Match: Messi
