Messi's Hat Trick Leads Argentina to Victory Against Algeria

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Lionel Scaloni has lived a lifetime in football. Titles in Spain with Deportivo La Coruña. A World Cup raised into the night in Qatar. Pressure, glory, scrutiny — he has walked through all of it.

And yet nothing quite prepared him for what happened on a humid Tuesday in Missouri, when Lionel Messi walked off the pitch with a World Cup hat trick to his name and straight into his manager’s arms.

Scaloni hugged him, then broke.

Tears from a World Cup–winning coach. In the opening game of a tournament Argentina hope will last eight matches. That is the force Messi carries with him now. Not just in the stands, where tens of thousands travel simply to say they saw him, but inside the inner circle — teammates, staff, the man who picks the team.

“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.”

On Tuesday, that aura turned ruthless.

A Hat Trick and a Record Book Rewritten

Argentina beat Algeria 3–0. The scoreline feels almost bland compared to what unfolded. Messi scored all three, dragging the game away from a competitive contest into something bordering on exhibition.

He had never scored a World Cup hat trick before. He chose this stage, this night, to do it.

In the process, he pushed past Ronaldo of Brazil and pulled level with Miroslav Klose at the top of the all-time men’s World Cup scoring chart. Earlier in the day, Kylian Mbappé had hit two to send his own marker down. Hours later, Messi simply went past him.

This is what he does: resets the bar just when someone else thinks they’ve raised it.

Messi later revealed it had been a hard day for Scaloni because of something that happened away from the field. The details stayed private. The emotion did not. It hung over the touchline, visible every time the camera caught the coach watching his captain.

Messi himself, though, treated history like a footnote.

“Honestly, no,” he 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. Mbappe 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.”

That has always been the contradiction with Messi. The numbers are monstrous. His relationship with them is almost casual.

‘Messi Things’

The scoreboard says three goals. The game told a different story.

Messi dictated the rhythm, then tore it apart when he felt like it. He drifted into pockets that seemed harmless until, suddenly, they weren’t. One moment he was invisible, swallowed by a tangle of bodies. The next, he was gliding away from defenders who knew exactly what was coming and still couldn’t get close.

Algeria’s Ibrahim Maza summed it up with a shrug and a phrase that will follow Messi to every stadium on earth.

“We weren’t too bad,” the attacker said, before admitting his team simply couldn’t overcome “Messi things.”

Asked what that meant, he didn’t bother dressing it up.

“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.”

Those “things” included the sheer will to start and finish moves on his own. The burst from midfield that still carries a downhill menace, even at an age when most players have long since lost that gear. The luck that seems to find him, like a foul that might have drawn a card on another night but didn’t here, allowing the play to roll on and the pressure to build.

He turns even games into mismatches. That is the gap between Messi and the legends whose records he keeps hunting down. Klose, Ronaldo, the rest — great finishers, iconic forwards. Messi is the system and the finisher, the architect and the executioner.

Expectation, Not Euphoria

Inside a sellout crowd of 69,045, the noise for each goal felt like a release. For Scaloni and his staff, it was something else: a reminder.

This cannot be the peak of Argentina’s tournament. It has to be the first step.

The defending champions arrived with questions. Messi had taken a knock with Inter Miami before the competition, and his fitness hovered over the build-up. On this evidence, the concern can wait. He looked sharp, hungry, locked in.

The real test now sits with those around him. The players who talk about his aura, who feel what Scaloni feels every day in training, have to match his level. Or at least get close enough that his genius can tip the balance, not carry the full load.

Messi, as ever, kept the horizon narrow.

“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. Nothing beyond that. Not publicly, anyway.

The Aura and the Edge

Scaloni talks about an aura around Messi. You could feel it in Kansas City. In the way Algerian defenders dropped half a step deeper when he took his first touch. In the way every Argentinian attack seemed to bend toward him, even when he started the move on the halfway line. In the way the stadium hummed every time he so much as checked over his shoulder.

That aura has carried Argentina to one World Cup. It might carry them to another. But it also exposes them. If Messi is this central, this decisive, what happens if the rhythm stutters, if the magic doesn’t flow quite as freely one night?

For now, that’s a question for another day. On this one, the captain walked off with the match ball, his coach in tears, and his name once again inked across the World Cup record book.

If Argentina keep their promise to “fight until we can’t,” and if Messi stays at anything close to this level, Scaloni may yet find himself crying again before this tournament is over.

He will not be alone.