Some old photographs gather dust, some others gather meaning.

When Lionel Messi held a five-month-old Lamine Yamal during a charity calendar shoot around Christmas 2007, it was just another click. Nearly two decades on, it has become part of football folklore.

During Euro 2024, Yamal’s father Mounir Nasraoui shared the image with the caption: “The beginning of two legends.” What was probably a throwaway line then reads like prophecy now as the two gear up to face each other in the FIFA World Cup final.

Fans, pundits, players and coaches have all weighed in on the duo, and they all have the same opinion.

The parallels are hard to ignore. Messi scored his first World Cup goal when he was 18, wearing the No. 19 shirt. Twenty years later, Yamal did the same, at the same age and with the same jersey number! He is Barcelona’s youngest debutant and also the youngest goalscorer, breaking records that once belonged to Messi. The list goes on and on.

“For me, Messi is the greatest football player in history. He is a legend and I do not find myself worthy of being compared to him. I do not want to be Messi, and he knows it. I want to follow my own path,” Yamal once said.

Even so, it’s hard to miss how closely the teenager is tracing the trail Messi laid down, and doing it better than others who were hastily crowned the Argentine magician’s successor.

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Messi, now 39, is chasing one more piece of history, trying to make Argentina the first team since Brazil in 1962 to defend the World Cup. Up against him will be the 19-year-old Yamal, the face of a Spanish side hoping to lift the trophy for only the second time.

Spain once tried hard to convince Messi to play for La Roja, back when La Albiceleste was slow to notice him. That push peaked before the 2003 Under-17 World Cup where the Spaniards, featuring Messi’s La Masia teammate Cesc Fabregas, defeated the Argentines 3-2 in the semifinal. Fabregas netted a brace, including the match-winner. Jose Pekerman, the Argentine coach, revealed that the Spanish players during the post-match handshake told him: “If you had this kid (Messi), you would have been the champions.”

Messi, however, stayed loyal to Argentina, leaving behind the old question of what Spain might have looked like with him in the line-up. That fantasy will never play out. But in Yamal, Spain may have found something close to it.

The stage is now set for a generational showdown. One gladiator walks onto football’s grandest spectacle for the first time. The other, probably, for his last dance. Between them sits two decades, a stack of broken records and a photograph that has come to signify how destiny always plays a role in football.

The beautiful game brings these two together in the same frame once again, not as legend and heir but as opponents battling for the ultimate prize.

Lionel Scaloni had barely sat down before he admitted the obvious.

Argentina had put its supporters through unnecessary “suffering”. Yet the manager was in no mood to apologise for the chaos. What he had witnessed, he felt, was something larger than a comeback win over Egypt, larger even than qualification. It was proof of the sort of team Argentina is, a side which never gives up.

“We made our people suffer even though we didn’t play a bad game,” Scaloni said after the 3-2 victory. “I am a coach for moments like this. The calibre of what we saw goes beyond just going through (to the quarterfinals). We would have been out if we didn’t fight.”

Scaloni insisted that Argentina had not been as poor as the scoreline at one stage suggested. Egypt, he acknowledged, was “an excellent team” that converted its openings well, but he pointed to the opportunities his own side had created long before the late surge. “We had three or four clear chances and if we had scored, nobody would talk about it. We had to dig in.”

Even when Argentina fell two goals behind, the chief coach never felt that the game had escaped it completely. “You feel concerned when you are not in control, but today we were. I saw the game going our way as we created chances.” It was, in effect, an argument that Argentina’s tough times came not from inferiority but from wastefulness.

The emotional centre of Scaloni’s night was Lionel Messi. The captain failed to convert a penalty and looked, for a while, like the tragic figure in Argentina’s elimination story. But he then became one of the authors of its rescue. “Messi is a role model for all the players,” Scaloni said. “He missed a penalty, but he still asks for the ball and goes on and on.”

He stopped short of placing the “epic” night alongside the World Cup final in Qatar but suggested that it belonged to the same emotional universe. Messi, he said, “lives football for moments like this”, and Argentina wanted him to keep enjoying them while he still could.

But Scaloni was careful not to let the story become only about him or his captain. “It’s useless to say we win because of my actions. We have these great players, and you use them when you need them. That’s not genius. The players are making the difference”.

The hallmark of champions is not simply their brilliance but the quality waiting beyond the spotlight. Argentina started without several of its biggest names, including captain Lionel Messi, against Jordan yet scarcely looked diminished as it completed a flawless Group J campaign with a 3-1 triumph on Sunday.

Lionel Scaloni made nine changes to the side that beat Austria, with only goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez and striker Lautaro Martinez retaining their spots. For much of the opening half, the loudest cheers inside the Dallas colosseum were reserved not for the players on the pitch but the man sitting in the dugout.

Every time the giant screen showed Messi, seated alongside clubmate Rodrigo De Paul with an amused expression, the stadium erupted before returning to its familiar chorus. “Muchachos, ahora nos volvimos a ilusionar, quiero ganar la cuarta, quiero ser campeón mundial (Guys, now we can dream again, I want to win the fourth one, I want to be world champion),” sang the Argentine faithful.

On the field, Argentina’s understudies gave them more to cheer for. The South Americans monopolised possession but initially found Jordan’s compact defensive block difficult to break down. The breakthrough, however, arrived in the 19th minute after Mohannad Abutaha brought Giovani Lo Celso down just outside the penalty box. The Real Betis midfielder punished the untidy Jordanians by curling his free-kick around a poorly organised wall.

Argentina’s pressure soon brought another reward. Lautaro’s angled effort struck the post before Marcos Senesi, following up on the rebound, was caught in the face by Nizar Al-Rashdan’s raised boot. After a VAR review, the referee pointed to the spot, and Lautaro calmly sent his penalty into the bottom-left corner.

In Messi’s absence, Argentina found different routes to goal, and around the half-hour mark, the contest was already drifting away from Jordan. But the Asian side, playing in its first World Cup, refused to become a supporting act. Mousa Al-Tamari’s sliding finish in the 55th minute cut short the deficit, just as Messi started warming up.

The moment the No. 10 stepped towards the halfway line, the crowd found another gear. The roar that greeted his arrival dwarfed every celebration that had come earlier.

His now-customary World Cup goal — for a seventh successive match — arrived in the 80th minute as he outfoxed Jordanian goalkeeper Yazid Abulaila with a low free-kick that flew past the wall at 103kmph. At last, the full house of 70,649 had what it had been waiting for.