In April 2022, soccer fans worldwide finally found out which teams would be in Group C of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar: Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and Mexico. One month before Argentina’s first game, the team’s situation was critical: some players were injured, others had not played for a long time, and a third group was not performing well with the international teams where they regularly played. Even worse, Lionel Messi injured his ankle the Saturday before Argentina’s first World Cup game.  

Argentina started on the wrong foot. On November 22nd, they lost their first match to Saudi Arabia but four days later Argentina scored two goals against Mexico and repeated their success against Poland in the last soccer match of their group. Argentine soccer fans and fans around the world thought that this team will be eliminated as easily as it had been in the 2022 World Cup in Korea and Japan, but it fought back. Their players fought to prove that they were not the ‘dark horse’ of the competition. 

Three more matches were enough to take Argentina to the final game on December 18th, 2022: first, a victory against Australia; then a tie against the Netherlands (broken later with a set of penalties), and finally a victory against Croatia.  

This is the difficult road taken by the Argentinean national team which waited 36 years to win the World Cup. Every kick, every goal, and every penalty was another step to ultimate victory in the 2022 FIFA World Cup.