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      Kylian Mbappé Is Ready to Make Messi’s Moment His Own

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      The France and Argentina stars are teammates at Qatar-owned Paris St.-Germain. But when they collide in the World Cup final, both have much to gain, and a lot to lose.DOHA, Qatar — In those early months of the season, before anything was decided, the superstars of Paris St.-Germain mostly talked about what they could win together.The French championship was surely viewed as a formality; P.S.G. these days always seems to win that title. The Champions League was seen as a bigger prize; the team, assembled with the outlay of vast quantities of Qatar’s considerable wealth, had never won it.But in the locker room at Paris St.-Germain’s training facility, the team’s three headliners — the star forwards Neymar of Brazil, Kylian Mbappé of France and Lionel Messi of Argentina — also had another trophy on their minds. As they exchanged gentle ribbing and regular banter inside the aging locker room at Camp des Loges, a former French military camp surrounded by forest on the outskirts of Paris, all of them knew the World Cup was coming, and all of them desperately wanted to win it.“Everybody defends his country,” Mbappé said, laughing as he described the exchanges during an interview at The New York Times’s Manhattan office this summer. “But we laugh a lot. We’re gonna say: ‘Yeah, my country’s gonna win. We’re gonna beat you. No, we are gonna beat you.’”Mbappé in October with his Paris St.-Germain teammates Lionel Messi and Neymar. Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut now what for months served as background chatter, a way for top athletes to blow off steam, has suddenly become very real.Neymar has already left the conversation, and the World Cup. But Mbappé and Messi are safely through to Sunday’s final at the stadium in Lusail. Messi, who has said he is playing his final World Cup, will be seeking to claim the only prize that has eluded him in a glittering career. Mbappé is after a different honor: He can become a double World Cup winner if France wins on Sunday, repeating a feat last achieved by the Brazil teams of Pelé in 1958 and ’62.Mbappé had already written his name alongside Pelé’s four years ago in Russia, when he joined the Brazilian as the only teenagers to score in a World Cup final. His stunning run of form then, not only the goals but the unshakable confidence he showed in helping to deliver France’s title, elevated his status to genuine superstar overnight.In Qatar, Mbappé could no longer have the comfort of being the coming man, someone who might emerge from the shadows. Excellence, he knew, would be expected.“It’s different because I’m a different player,” he said of his second World Cup. “When I arrived in my first World Cup, I was a young teenager. I was a young guy. Everybody in the world didn’t know me well. I was a big player of P.S.G. but not really famous around the world. Now it is different. Everybody knows me — the pressure is different.”So far, Mbappe appears to have handled that pressure.He and Messi are tied in the race to be the tournament’s top scorer, with five goals each. While he has not always been at his very best, including curiously quiet stretches against both England and Morocco in the knockout round, Mbappé has regularly shown glimpses of the pace and explosiveness that will leave little doubt that he carries on his shoulders France’s chances of conquering Argentina, and Messi.“For me it is the biggest thing in world football,” Mbappé said. “Because when you talk about football, you have the World Cup in your mind. Because this is the only competition that everybody watches. You don’t need to love football to watch the World Cup.”Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMbappé helped usher Argentina out of the 2018 World Cup, at top, and beat Australia at this one.Issei Kato/ReutersFrance saw off Raheem Sterling and England in the quarterfinals, and Morocco in a taut semifinal.Elsa/Getty ImagesThe mass appeal will only be heightened on Sunday. The final’s predominant story line — Messi’s final shot at the one trophy he craves more than any other — has in part cast Mbappé as a foil in the narrative, the key man who could keep Messi from getting his Hollywood ending.The two have been teammates for more than a year now, the young contender and the aging star, and it has sometimes felt like a bumpy accommodation. As if sharing a field, let alone one ball, might not be enough to assuage the collections of talent — and egos — assembled by P.S.G., Mbappe said the noise that sometimes surrounds those relationships is not always an accurate reflection of reality.After all, he said, like any other soccer-loving child, he would have dreamed of lining up alongside Messi and Neymar.“I think the problem comes from outside because everybody asks questions they don’t have answers for, so they put some problem between us,” Mbappé said in the summer, amid whispers he had demanded control as the price for his re-signing with P.S.G. News reports about discord, he said, were untrue. “We have a great relationship.”But it is hard not to see that relationship tested on Sunday. One of them will leave the field a champion, the other with his heart broken.Messi’s ability to alter games all by himself could be France’s biggest hurdle in Sunday’s final. Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesMbappé said he knew what to expect. Able to study Messi’s game at such close quarters at his club for more than a year, he said that he has been in awe of the Argentine’s ability to pick the right move, to play the right pass, to measure the moments requiring his intervention with perfect timing, no matter the chaos around him.“He is calm, always calm,” Mbappé said of Messi. “Calm with the ball. Calm before he shoots. He always has control of everything he does.“It’s really impressive because sometimes there is big pressure with the game and with the fans, with the people. But he is always calm to make the right decision in the right moments.”Sunday, too, may be decided in one moment, by one moment of genius from Messi or, just maybe, a winning goal from Mbappé.Outside Al Bayt Stadium earlier this week, in the early hours as Wednesday turned into Thursday after France defeated Morocco in a semifinal match, there was a sense of relief as well as pressure in Mbappé’s camp. Fayza Lamari, his mother and a cornerstone of his relentless march to stardom from the earliest days, emerged from the arena near the V.I.P. entrance yelling, “We won! We won!” as she made her way toward the exit.She was not the only one smiling. Qatar, which has spent more than $200 billion on staging the World Cup, now has its dream final. In a few weeks it will welcome both Messi and Mbappé to P.S.G., reuniting its two biggest stars on the Qatari-owned club after they have squared off in a showcase final in Lusail.For Qatar, the question of Messi or Mbappé does not really matter. It has already won.Carl Recine/Reuters More

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      It’s the World Cup Souvenir Everyone Wants. Getting One Is the Hard Part.

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      A game-worn Lionel Messi jersey is the most coveted collectible in Qatar. Good luck getting hold of the one (or two) he wears in the World Cup final.DOHA, Qatar — There is something about the idea of obtaining one of Lionel Messi’s jerseys that makes even the most experienced, sober opponents revert to heartfelt, eager fandom. They pursue him at halftime, surround him at the final whistle. Teammates squabble among themselves for the right to claim a precious memento of their brush with greatness.Other than a World Cup winners’ medal, there will be no prize more sought-after when France meets Messi’s Argentina at Lusail Iconic Stadium on Sunday than the 35-year-old Messi’s jersey. It is, after all, likely to be the ultimate limited edition collectible, one of only four — at most — in existence: a jersey worn by the world’s finest player in the world’s biggest game.The bad news is that it is unlikely to be unavailable, to anyone.Quite how many genuine, match-worn Messi jerseys are in existence is difficult to pinpoint. Argentina’s win against Croatia in Tuesday’s semifinal was, officially, the 1,002nd appearance, for club and country, of Messi’s senior career. That does not mean, though, that there are 1,002 Messi jerseys. The true figure, in fact, is more likely to be closer to double that.Many players, after all, choose to use two jerseys during games, switching into a fresh number at halftime. Whether Messi does that in every match is not clear, but he has certainly done so on occasion. In 2012, for example, executives at the German team Bayer Leverkusen had to admonish two players for arguing over who would get Messi’s shirt at halftime.That there may be several thousand Messi jerseys in circulation that contain trace amounts of his sweat, though, does not mean they are any easier to obtain. Messi maintains a strict protocol on swapping jerseys. His first rule is: He never initiates the exchange. He has only ever made one exception. Early in his career, he approached Zinedine Zidane, then with Real Madrid, and asked if they might exchange jerseys. Other than that, he has said, “I don’t ask for shirts.”His second rule: He would rather swap with another Argentine. In 2017, he posted a photo to his Instagram account of the room in his Barcelona home that he had devoted to a display of all the jerseys he has collected over the years, each of them impeccably arranged, immaculately presented.Many of them bear the names of some of his era’s brightest stars: Thierry Henry, Luis Suárez, Philipp Lahm, Iker Casillas. A majority, though, belong to his countrymen: not just his peers and friends, the likes of Ángel Di María, Sergio Agüero and Pablo Aimar — the player that Messi himself has described as his hero — but lesser lights, too: Chori Domínguez, Oscar Ustari and Tomás De Vincenti, all beneficiaries of his Argentina-first policy.“I got quite a few over the years,” said Maxi Rodríguez, a friend and former international teammate of Messi’s. “I played against him quite a lot when I was in Spain, when I was with Espanyol and Atlético Madrid. We never arranged it beforehand or talked about it. It was just whenever we had chance.”Rodríguez said that he had several Messi jerseys in his own display cases, though he slightly sheepishly admitted that he does not maintain his collection as fastidiously as Messi. Still, he is doing rather better than some players who swapped jerseys with the Argentine earlier in his career, before he became Messi.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      When World Cup Reality Isn’t What It Seems

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      LUSAIL, Qatar — Fatih pulls the car over, letting the engine idle, and reaches for his phone. He hurriedly swipes away the various ride-sharing apps he has open and scrolls through his WhatsApp chats with a practiced finger. He is searching for a group called “Brazil Fans Qatar.” This, he says, will explain everything.Last month, as teams started to arrive in Qatar ahead of the World Cup, several found guards of honor waiting for them at their hotels and training bases: groups of a few dozen fans, clad in national-team jerseys, waving national flags, carrying homemade banners and beating drums.In most circumstances, that would not be especially noteworthy. Here, though, it was impossible not to wonder.There had long been doubts about how many fans would attend the first World Cup in the Middle East, thanks to both practical concerns — the cost of spending weeks in Doha, the relative scarcity of alcohol — and ethical ones, centered on Qatar’s treatment of the migrant workers who had built the tournament, and its criminalization of homosexuality.Qatar, it had already emerged, had recruited several hundred “fan leaders” from across the world, paying for their flights and accommodations in exchange for their enthusiastic, public support. The suspicion ran that the groups waiting to welcome the teams, apparently wholly composed of South Asian men, were another arm of the same program.No, no, no, Fatih said, suddenly stopping the car. He is ordinarily “an accountant and a sales executive,” he said, but for the duration of the tournament he has set up — with permission — as a taxi service, too. Like most foreign workers here, he preferred not to use his last name out of fear of drawing unwanted attention from the country’s authorities.Fireworks and a full house before the United States played Iran.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAfter a minute or so, he finds what he wants: a video from Kerala, his home state in India. It had been shot that day but had already been forwarded many times. It showed two groups of men, some carrying sticks, brawling in the center of a village. Half of them are wearing bright yellow Brazil jerseys. The others are in the distinctive sky blue and white of Argentina.“This happens every FIFA World Cup,” Fatih said. There are other fans whose loyalties lie with Portugal, or England, or Spain, he explained, but mostly it is Brazil and Argentina. The affiliations run deep. Fatih might change his club team, he said, but Brazil was nonnegotiable.It was fans like these, like him, who had greeted the teams in Doha: Keralans who live and work in Qatar and had been sufficiently enthused by the prospect of seeing these usually remote, distant stars in the flesh that many of them paid hundreds of dollars for tickets to games. Fatih himself was going to see Brazil play Cameroon, he said. Any cost was worth it.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      David Beckham Is the World Cup’s Missing Mouthpiece

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      Qatar paid David Beckham tens of millions of dollars to promote the country and its interests. To its frustration, it has not received much return on the investment.DOHA, Qatar — In the early days of the World Cup, with the group stage underway and the world’s eyes locked on Qatar, the host of soccer’s biggest championship was eager to take advantage of the spotlight shining on its tiny desert nation.To sell itself to the world, Qatar had spent millions of dollars on celebrity endorsements, including agreements with a battalion of former soccer players who could speak to fans with street cred and in a common language. Now, the time had come to roll out its biggest signing, the one star in its arsenal in a league of his own: David Beckham.So during a midweek lunchtime, plans were drawn up for Beckham and several other ex-players to show up at a fan zone set up close to Doha’s bayside Corniche. There, they would greet fans and be interviewed by an employee of the organizing committee on a specially built stage. Beckham’s team agreed to the request that he attend but set two conditions: his presence was not be announced ahead of time, and reporters were not to be alerted.The event was a dud. The fan zone at Al Bidda Park was so deserted at the arranged time, in fact, that the event was canceled, even though Beckham and the others were already backstage, according to multiple people familiar with the plans.The curious incident, though, was emblematic of the unusual relationship between Qatar and Beckham. It is a partnership with a pitchman who rarely pitches and an arrangement that has shadowed, rather than showcased, the host country. But it also has produced a strange reality in which one of the world’s most recognizable celebrities is at once everywhere but also nowhere.Beckham has been visible, but not vocal, in Doha.Alex Pantling/Getty ImagesBeckham’s face is plastered on billboards all over Doha. He appears in advertisements on television during halftime breaks and in social media feeds promoting a pass to access cultural events in Qatar. He also has been spotted in the V.V.I.P. stands at World Cup stadiums, and he was filmed visiting the England team before its elimination.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Keeping the National in National Team Coach

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      There is nothing in the rules that requires a World Cup team to be managed by someone born, raised or otherwise connected to that country. So should it matter?DOHA, Qatar — Brazil’s players already seem to have identified their preferred candidate. They had known, long before their quarterfinal defeat to Croatia sent them out of the World Cup, that Tite — the affable, cerebral coach of the national team for the past six years — would be stepping down. Now, they had decided that the most exacting job in international soccer should go to Fernando Diniz.The 48-year-old Diniz certainly had a strong case. The squad’s elder statesmen, Daniel Alves and Thiago Silva, offered glowing references. So did a couple of the team’s younger members, Antony and Bruno Guimaraes, who had worked with him early in their careers. Most important, he had Neymar on board: As long ago as July, Brazil’s most influential star had tweeted about his admiration for Diniz.Not everyone is quite so convinced. Ronaldo, the World Cup-winning striker who has functioned, essentially, as a ghost at the feast during this tournament, suggested he did not “see many options” for Tite’s successor among Brazilian coaches. Diniz, he said, was the best of them, but he was far more enthused by the idea of something unprecedented: appointing a foreigner to coach the Brazilian national team.The Italian Carlo Ancelotti, the Spaniard Pep Guardiola, the Portuguese Abel Ferreira were all, Ronaldo said, more appealing. “I get a good feeling from these names,” he said.Several Brazilian players have suggested that Fernando Diniz, a Brazilian, should be the national team’s next coach. Others are pressing for the country’s first foreign coach.Sergio Moraes/ReutersBrazil is not the only country to have left Qatar rather earlier than expected that finds itself wrestling with this issue. A quarter of the teams in the tournament had barely picked up their baggage from the carousel before they parted company with their managers. A couple, the Netherlands and Spain, have moved quickly to appoint replacements. Six more are beginning their search for candidates. A handful of others, including England and Portugal, may yet join them.That task, though, is not quite as easy as it sounds. Managing a national team is not — and has not been for some time — the pinnacle of a coach’s career. Most of the game’s most feted managers, obsessives who thrive on fine-tuning their complex, intricate systems on a daily basis, find the disjointed nature of international soccer unattractive.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Morocco Gave Everything in the World Cup Semifinal. It Needed a Little More Against France.

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      AL KHOR, Qatar — The drums kept on beating. The whistles kept on shrieking. Morocco’s players kept on coming, again and again, their legs burning and their lungs heaving, as they raged against the dying of the light. At the end, Morocco had run out of road. At no point, not for a second, did it run out of fight.The World Cup, then, will culminate in the sort of blockbuster final that both FIFA, its organizer, and Qatar, its host, have craved: Lionel Messi’s Argentina, seeking to deliver arguably the finest player of all time his crowning glory, against Kylian Mbappé, his heir apparent, and France, aiming to become the first nation in half a century to retain the most coveted prize in sports. Today, Gianni Infantino feels very smug indeed.Regardless of which team emerges triumphant on Sunday, though, which story line is reverse-engineered as destiny, on some level this will always be Morocco’s World Cup, the one that made it a trailblazer, a record-breaker, a watermark that will not fade. From this point on, a whole slew of achievements will all be the first since Morocco.It was here that Morocco became the first team from the Arab world to make a World Cup quarterfinal. Then, a few days later, it was here that it became the first African team to extend its run all the way to the semifinals.That it could go no further, beaten by France, 2-0, in a breathless, furious game at Al Bayt, neither erases nor diminishes those feats. It does not alter the fact that it was in Qatar where Morocco proved to a “whole generation” that it could produce “miracles,” as its redoubtable goalkeeper, Yassine Bounou, put it. It was in Qatar that Morocco, according to its coach, Walid Regragui, redefined the limits of “what was possible.”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Argentina’s Most Sacred World Cup Watch Party: Maradona’s Former Home

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      A Buenos Aires businessman bought Diego Maradona’s old house and has been opening it up for Argentina’s World Cup matches, meat included.BUENOS AIRES — Argentina had just punched its ticket to the World Cup final with a 3-0 victory over Croatia on Tuesday, but most Argentines at the party simply wanted to poke around this stranger’s house.There was a retiree taking selfies in a mirrored corner bar. A house cleaner hung out the window of a bare bedroom. A tattoo artist checked out a backed-up toilet upstairs. And a hotel owner who had brought his mother-in-law was wandering around barefoot.“When I entered, I started crying,” said Osvaldo Bonacchi, 52, an air-conditioner repairman, who was starting to tear up again on the spiral staircase leading to the carpeted attic, where someone said there used to be a sauna. He had lived nearby for 15 years, and always wondered what it was like inside.“To be here is a dream,” he said.The battered, three-story brick chalet in a quiet Buenos Aires neighborhood once belonged to the Argentine soccer hero Diego Maradona, and in this World Cup, it has become one of the hottest places in Argentina to watch a match.A local entrepreneur bought the house last month and has opened the doors for the past several games, paying for drinks and more than 1,000 pounds of meat for hundreds of friends, neighbors and strangers crowded around Maradona’s backyard pool to cheer on the national team.The bar in Maradona’s former home.Ariel Fernando García, the new owner of the home, with his daughters on what was once Maradona’s balcony.“We started letting people in, and then they collapsed and started crying,” the house’s new owner, Ariel Fernando García, 47, said of the first party. “For me, he was an extraterrestrial,” he said of Maradona. “No man has given more joy to Argentines.”Maradona died of a heart attack in 2020 at age 60 but remains one of Argentina’s biggest figures. His story of a poor Buenos Aires boy rising to become one of history’s greatest soccer players and the leader of Argentina’s 1986 World Cup championship team has made him a sort of deity in this nation of 46 million.In fact, the Church of Maradona is a legally recognized religion in Argentina, now entering its 25th year, that claims tens of thousands of members with branches around the world. Some Google searches will return a little box of questions that other people searched, starting with: “Is Diego Maradona a God?”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Théo Hernandez, France’s Goalscorer, Stepped Up After His Brother, Lucas, Fell

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      Most of the injuries that have befallen France, that sapped its team of world-class stars like N’Golo Kante and Paul Pogba, occurred before Les Bleus began playing in Qatar. But one, a torn knee ligament for Lucas Hernandez, came early in their first match against Australia.The man who replaced him at left-back just scored France’s first goal in its World Cup semifinal against Morocco. His name his Théo Hernandez, and he is Lucas’s younger brother.In the fifth minute, Théo Hernandez, who plays for A.C. Milan, corralled a loose ball near the goal post and showed tremendous poise and agility in getting on top of the ball with his left foot, sneaking it past the Moroccan goalkeeper, Bono.An absolute dream start for France 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/utpt5ysaTn— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) December 14, 2022
      Théo Hernandez committed the foul Saturday late against England that led to what could have been a tying penalty; Harry Kane missed it. But today, he made up for that mistake with a goal that might lift France into its second consecutive final. More