One question for each 2026 World Cup team. How many One Last Rides do Argentina and Lionel Messi have left in them?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group J preview. You can also read previews of Austria, Algeria, or Jordan.
How many One Last Rides do Argentina and Lionel Messi have left in them?
Something that has become common on the husk of a social media platform known as Facebook is a particular genre of AI-generated tour posters, almost always for a superstar co-headlining tour of classic rock legends, and almost always called “One Last Ride.”
Grouplings of artists that have gone on “One Last Ride” together in these Boomer AI fantasies include Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Celine Dion, and Alison Krauss, and — most concerningly — Fleetwood Mac.
One weird subgenre of AI slop on Facebook is the "One Last Ride" tours. I just did a quick search and these 'tour announcements' were all posted in the past 24 hours alone! (And there are way more) pic.twitter.com/Ep2XRyUyV5
— Ray Padgett (@rayfp) February 12, 2026
This is both a concerning sign of the gradual decay of the media literacy of online Americans, and the extent to which they can be targeted by obviously fake stuff as long as it hits the right nostalgia pleasure centers, and also Argentina’s main roster-building strategy in the 2020s.
After a decade of failure and frustration, a veteran core finally coalesced to win the 2021 Copa America, what seemed at the time to be their last good chance to win a major tournament with Lionel Messi.
So they brought that group of players together for the 2022 World Cup, which at the time seemed like the last chance for Lionel Messi to win the World Cup. And they won that too.
And then Messi wasn’t quite done yet so they got the band back together for the 2024 Copa America, and they won that too.
And despite all the change that two years can bring in football, the same old Argentina crew is back for one last ride in 2026. Of the starting 11 from the final in Qatar, every single player is back for this tournament with the exception of Ángel Di María. Three of the six players who came into that game as substitutes are also returning.
Lionel Scaloni’s side will line up almost exactly how you think they would. It will be either a 4-3-3 or a 4-2-3-1 with Emiliano Martínez in goal, Nicolás Otamendi and probably Cristian Romero in central defense, Rodrigo De Paul and Enzo Fernandez in central midfield, Julián Alvarez up top, and Lionel Messi technically as a right winger but realistically kind of wherever he wants. With minor variations based on occasional injuries to Messi and others, that’s how they breezed through South American qualifying, finishing nine points ahead of their closest rivals.
The big changes are at the margins. Thiago Almada was a rarely-used bench player in 2022, and he will likely play a decently-larged role this tournament. Giuliano Simeone has also emerged as an all-purpose attacker for Atletico Madrid in the four years between tournaments, and he could be a major asset in a tournament that now has an extra game.
The most notable new player is Nico Paz, the Como attacking midfielder who is widely considered to be one of the rising young stars in Europe. Coming off a 12 goal and six assist season in Italy, he could be a difference-maker for most squads, but there hasn’t been much space for him on the field lately. Paz enters Argentina games as a late substitute, if at all.
Argentina also left a few promising young players home for this tournament. Most notably Real Madrid winger Franco Mastantuono, who is a skillful left-footed winger and maybe the best shot at the team to be the long-term replacement for di Maria, was cut from the preliminary roster for the World Cup. The loyalty to the older cohort might come at the expense of incorporating young talents like Mastantuono or Paz.
To be fair to Lionel Scaolini, he has been rolling out slightly different variations of the same lineup for five years, and he’s won everything there is to win over that time. Nothing has gone wrong so far.
Except it did so frequently come so close to going wrong. The 2022 World Cup could have been a disaster at so many junctures. When they needed a Messi wondergoal to finally break a 0-0 tie against Mexico that would have torpedoed their tournament; when they nearly blew a 2-0 lead in the round of 16 against Australia; when they did blow a 2-0 lead against the Netherlands and dodged a potential Messi red card to squeak through on penalties; when they blew another 2-0 lead in the final against France and would have lost before the shootout had Martinez not made that now-iconic save against Randal Kolo Muani.
Argentina have been great for five years, but they have also white-knuckled their way to lots of those wins. Messi now has a bulletproof resume as the best player of the century, and he has shown very little sign of his age in MLS. It would not be surprising at all if this team, which has been through so many battles together, once again scraped their way through a long tournament and came out the other side with yet another trophy.
But if you dance with the devil long enough he might follow you home. Argentina have courted disaster so many times during this run that eventually a bounce will go against them in one of these razor-thin knockout matches.
Messi could pull off one more immortal moment, but it’s also possible that this last ride will be one ride too many for the same Argentina core.
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