Spain crowned world champions<\/a> for a second time, ending Argentina’s defence of the title they won in 2022.<\/p>\nMessi has now lost two World Cup finals after Argentina were defeated 1-0 by Germany in 2014.<\/p>\n
At 39 years old, Messi is unlikely to feature at the 2030 tournament, though he is yet to clarify his international future.<\/p>\n
“The pain is immense, and this wound will take time to heal. But I also hold onto all the good things,” Messi wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
“The matches we turned around by giving it our all – moments that will remain in our memories forever – and the support of an entire country which, combined with this group’s hard work and effort, brought us back among the world’s elite once again.<\/p>\n
“It is hard to fully appreciate our achievement right now, but this group reached two consecutive World Cup finals.<\/p>\n
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart for every greeting and message. Once again, we managed to unite as a country and stand together, sharing the immense pride of being Argentine.<\/p>\n
“I also want to congratulate Spain on winning the championship.”<\/p>\n
Messi contributed eight goals and four assists as Argentina reached the final for the third time in the past four World Cups.<\/p>\n
He played a key role in his side coming from behind to beat Egypt and England in the knockout stages, but could not overcome a Spain side that conceded one goal in the whole tournament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lionel Messi says “the pain is immense” and that it “will take time to heal” after Argentina lost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-702185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}