Full Time
Argentina brushed aside Jordan 3-1 in their group stage finale to top the group with ease. Lo Celso opened the scoring in the 19th minute, Lautaro Martinez added a penalty before half-time, and Jordan's brief fightback via Al-Tamari lasted all of 25 minutes. Messi — starting on the bench, naturally — came on and lashed home a free-kick in the 80th to seal it and set a new World Cup record: seven consecutive tournaments with a goal. Jordan's historic first World Cup ends here; Argentina march on to face Cape Verde in the Round of 32.
Pre-match Talking Points
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1Jordan are already out. Argentina already know who they play next. This is technically a World Cup group stage match but both sides have essentially moved on — one to the knockout rounds, one to the airport. Jordan are on zero points from two games, and even a win here won't save them. That said, they showed up and competed at their first-ever World Cup, so the least they deserve is a proper send-off.
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2Jordan have never played Argentina before. Ever. So there's no history to unpack, no old grudge to reference, no classic encounter from 1986 to wheel out. This is a genuinely new fixture on the international football calendar — which is either charming or alarming depending on how you feel about Jordan being here in the first place. (They qualified. They deserve to be here. That's the correct feeling.)
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3Lionel Messi is starting on the bench. Yes, the greatest player of his generation — possibly ever — has been rested for this one. Argentina's coach confirmed it before the match, which takes a lot of wind out of the sails if you came mainly to watch him. The good news: he'll probably come on at some point. The better news: Nico Paz, a 21-year-old Real Madrid product who's been quietly impressive, is set to start in his place. You can claim to have spotted him early.
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4Jordan's first-ever World Cup goal was scored by Ali Olwan against Austria in the opening match. It was the 50th minute, it was a landmark moment for a country that's never been here before, and the entire nation apparently lost its mind. Their coach, Jamal Sellami, is Moroccan — which is almost certainly not a coincidence given that Morocco reached the semi-finals in 2022 and became the template for every smaller nation's World Cup dreams. Jordan are trying to channel that energy, even if the results haven't quite matched the ambition.
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5Argentina are the defending world champions. Messi already overtook Miroslav Klose earlier in this tournament to become the all-time leading scorer in World Cup history — 18 goals and counting. Watching Jordan try to stop a squad of Champions League players while Messi watches from a folding chair on the touchline is, in its own way, a fairly complete summary of what the World Cup is. You've got the most decorated team in the world treating this as a training session, and a country playing in its first ever finals trying to make the most of every second.
Team Talking Points
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1Jordan's first-ever World Cup ended in the group stage with three defeats from three — 3-1 to Austria, 1-2 to Algeria, and 3-1 to a Lionel Messi-led Argentina — and they were already mathematically out before that last game even kicked off. For a country that had never played a single minute at a World Cup before this summer, the results were always going to be secondary to being there at all.
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2The high point came in the very first match: Ali Olwan scored Jordan's first-ever World Cup goal against Austria, racing onto a counter-attack and finishing calmly off the far post. It's a genuine piece of history — the first line in a chapter of the record books that, until this year, didn't exist for Jordan.
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3There isn't really a low point to single out beyond the draw itself — landing in a group with Argentina, the reigning champions, was always going to be brutal for a debutant nation, and Jordan competed without ever being disgraced.
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4Ali Olwan is the name to know — a 26-year-old striker who scored a hat-trick against Oman to clinch qualification in the first place, then became Jordan's first-ever World Cup goalscorer, capping a qualifying campaign in which he was one of the top scorers across the whole of Asian qualifying.
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5Jordan go home with zero points but a permanent place in their own football history — first World Cup, first goal, first taste of the biggest stage there is. Whatever comes next, nobody can take that away from this squad.
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Top thing to say down the pub
Jordan lost all three group games at their first-ever World Cup, but Ali Olwan scored their first goal in the competition's history, and no result undoes that.
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Avoid saying
Don't say "Jordan lost every game so what's the big deal" — this was their first-ever World Cup appearance, and Ali Olwan's goal against Austria wrote the first line of a history book Jordan simply didn't have before this summer.
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1Messi is 39 years old, just battled through a World Cup semi-final admitting afterwards he was "really very tired," and is somehow still leading the Golden Boot race with eight goals. If he lifts this one, it's Argentina's fourth title and his own farewell tour written by a screenwriter with no self-control.
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2Argentina reached this final the hard way: 1-0 down to England with time running out in the semi, then two goals late on flipped it to a 2-1 win. Nobody in this squad seems to know how to lose calmly, which is either agony or entertainment depending on which shirt you're wearing.
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3This is Argentina's third World Cup final in the last four tournaments and their seventh overall — a run of sustained excellence that doesn't get talked about enough because Messi understandably eats all the oxygen in the room.
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4The referee is Slovenian official Slavko Vincic, and Argentina fans have one specific memory of him: he was in charge the day Saudi Arabia beat them 2-1 in 2022, still the biggest shock of that tournament. Best not to bring this up in the tunnel.
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5Despite defending the title and having the tournament's most potent attack — 19 goals, more than anyone else in the competition — Argentina go into the final as betting underdogs, with Spain favourites on every market. Mention this and you'll sound like you actually follow the odds, not just the shirt numbers.
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Top thing to say down the pub
Messi's 39, admits he's knackered, and is one win away from a fourth World Cup with Argentina — if this is the last dance, it's a hell of a way to go out.
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Avoid saying
"Is this Messi's last World Cup?" — every outlet on earth has asked this exact question this week and Messi hasn't answered it once, so asking it out loud just tells people you've read the same three headlines as everyone else.