"I had no doubt that over the next 10 years he would be fighting to be one of the best players in the world." Jose Pekerman said that about an 18-year-old kid he sent on in the 75th minute of a 4-0 game. He wasn't wrong.
June 2006, Gelsenkirchen. Argentina were already dismantling Serbia and Montenegro when Pekerman introduced Lionel Messi to the World Cup stage. Within minutes, Messi set up Hernan Crespo, then scored himself — becoming the youngest Argentine to net at a World Cup. The final score was 6-0. The Messi era had quietly started.
A plan, not a cameo
Argentina fans weren't fully satisfied. Messi started only once at that tournament — a 0-0 draw with the Netherlands — and stayed on the bench as Germany knocked them out in a quarter-final penalty shootout. "Argentina blow it with crazy substitutions," the Guardian wrote. "Argentines wonder why Messi sat out," ran another headline.
Pekerman has heard it all and still doesn't apologize. His argument is coherent: Messi had grown up in Spain's football system and needed gradual exposure to the specific demands of international football. "I can't tell you that you're going to play many minutes," he told Messi before the tournament. "The team already has an organisation. You're going to bring a lot to the side, but only in the minutes I can give you."
Blunt. Honest. And, as it turned out, part of a framework that worked.
What twenty years looks like
Messi is now 39. He has played in six World Cups, appeared in 30 matches — more than anyone in the tournament's history — and scored 20 goals, also a record. He is simultaneously Argentina's youngest and oldest World Cup scorer. He lifted the trophy in Qatar in 2022.
Those are the numbers. What Pekerman keeps coming back to is something harder to quantify.
"The records he is setting will be very difficult to break. It isn't easy to stay at that level for so long, always finding new goals to achieve. And he has done it without losing his essence as a person."
Pekerman drew the Maradona comparison himself — not in terms of style, but in terms of that rare quality where the talent seems to exist outside the normal rules of age and development. "It was the same that had happened with Maradona. Something that went beyond his age."
The shy teenager who celebrated his 19th birthday during that Germany tournament alongside veterans like Roberto Ayala and Pablo Aimar — both now Scaloni's assistants — became the player who dragged Argentina across the line in every conceivable way. Nineteen years of hurt before Qatar. Then the one night that made it all make sense.
"I believe you have to be in the squad," Pekerman told him back in 2006. Understated, all things considered.
