Argentina's national team and Leo Messi are set to open their campaign for the 2026 World Cup overnight, between Tuesday and Wednesday, against Algeria, beginning the effort to defend the title won in 2022. In that context, Sports 5 cited a TyC opinion piece arguing that this is the World Cup Messi does not really need to win.
The column said Messi lifted the trophy in Qatar like someone receiving something he had waited for his whole life and feared would vanish if he blinked. It described the 2022 triumph as the end of a debt that was never fair, one that had been imposed on him for years by stands that had confused demand with punishment.
The piece argued that there is now no tension around the question, because for the first time in football history the best player in the world is arriving at a World Cup with nothing left to prove. “No debt. No unfinished story. No weight of a narrative that chased him for twenty years,” it said, adding that his legacy is already “written, sealed and beyond dispute.”
According to the column, Messi is returning because he wants to, and that desire, after everything he has gone through, is “the purest act of freedom” a top athlete can exercise. It also said that since that night in Qatar, he plays with a different mentality, no longer carrying the invisible burden that once darkened his face when he wore the Argentina shirt. The article concluded that Messi reaches the 2026 tournament “without debt, without trial and without the weight of the story he has already closed,” and that if anyone owes him anything, it is football, “not a title.”
