With apologies to Tolstoy, every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. And Argentina is very unhappy. On Thursday they staged an epic second half collapse on their way to losing 3-0 to Croatia. It’s not particularly interesting simply to say Argentina is bad. That much is apparent. What makes the Argentines interesting is the ways they are bad, the sheer variety of their mediocrity, so bad, in fact, that having the best player in the world, and possibly in history, Lionel Messi, hasn’t mattered at all.
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Argentina’s ineptitude comes in a range of flavors. They’ve been bad when adhering to Jorge Sampaoli’s tactics and bad when marginalizing them. They’ve been bad when they featured Messi and bad when making Messi’s game secondary to the team. They were bad against a team that pressed them and bad against a team that sat back. In two World Cup games, the only constant has been the fact that Argentina cannot get out of its own way.
In the 1-1 draw against Iceland, Argentina didn’t particularly implement the manic gameplan for which Sampaoli is known. Instead, the team took a more sedate approach against a side that was happy to sit back and defend. Argentina was happy to keep the ball and defend Iceland’s counter attacks as they came.
Problem was, this approach left Argentina utterly uninspired in attack. The plan was to pass to Messi and then… stand around. It was reminiscent of the 2014 team, which Messi carried to the final, but that is precisely the approach that Sampaoli was brought in to change—and with good reason. These tactics worked four years ago, when Messi and Angel Di Maria were 26, and a 30-year-old Javier Mascherano was still hanging onto the prime of his career as a defensive midfielder; in 2018, they were simply too slow and stultified.
And so for game two, against Croatia, Sampaoli went full Sampaoli. If there’s one thing the coach knows how to do, it’s build a lineup that is designed to create chaos. He played a formation with three center backs, one of whom was Ajax’s 5’8″ left back Nicola Tagliafico. Argentina went flying all over the field, pressing Croatia—frequently poorly—while depending on an oddly constructed defensive line to cover for the fact they had no fullbacks. It certainly resulted in them playing differently. They defended all over the field.
They also got picked apart. Oh, and the goalkeeper, Willy Caballero, decided to pass the ball directly to an opposition winger to concede Argentina’s first goal.
Sampaoli’s tactics marginalized Messi. A match played at such a frantic pace didn’t allow for the calm moments in which Messi thrives. Against Iceland, Messi was able to attack—he took 11 shots, created three chances, and missed a penalty—he just couldn’t convert. But against Croatia, he didn’t get the chance to slow the match down, dance in front of the backline, and conjure the miracles we’ve come to expect of him. Argentina as a whole had only ten shots; Messi had one. Using the Sampaoli plan was as ineffective as not using it.
There are a lot of ways to build a successful team. Teams with great players can succeed without a real tactical plan: Argentina did it four years ago and France is trying to do it now. Or, great teams can build a system that supports their talent, like Brazil’s combination of ball-winning midfielders feeding the ball to twinkle-toed attackers. In the best-case scenario, like Spain or Germany, those systems reinforce themselves, midfielders beget midfielders, and you end up with Xavi and Xabi Alonso giving way to Koke and Thiago, for example. Teams with slightly less talent can even prioritize a plan and pick the players that fit the tactics instead of the other way around. Which is what Sampaoli was able to do with Chile.
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Sampaoli’s Argentina, however, is none of those things. It’s a team with some great players and some mediocre ones, a team desperately need in need of a plan that accentuates what it does well and covers what it does poorly. Instead, Argentina has a pressing system that requires endless mobility from midfielders who are all over 30. When Samapoli decided that Mascherano’s partner against Iceland, the 32-year-old Lucas Biglia, wasn’t cutting it, he dropped him in favor of 32-year-old Enzo Perez.
Despite playing entirely differently across two matches, and playing poorly both times, the two most creative midfielders in Sampaoli’s squad, Ever Banega and Giovani Lo Celso played barely over half an hour combined, and neither got a start. Paolo Dybala, the superstar from Juventus and the most creative non-Messi attacker the team has, didn’t take the field until the 68th minute of the second game.
If there is one thing that Sampaoli seems entirely unequipped to do, it’s take an awkward collection of talent and build a system to get the best out of it. So, Argentina is left careening between two equally inefficient options. Either they employ the extremely basic and ineffective approach which they are no longer good enough to get away with or they play an up-tempo pressing game which they are ill-equipped to deploy and marginalizes their best player. Neither is a great option, to say the least.
There’s nothing grand about Argentina’s collapse. They are a team that has a bad goalkeeper, a shaky defense, an old midfield, and a disjointed attack. Sometimes teams get old. Sometimes teams get bad. Sometimes teams exacerbate, rather than mitigate, their weaknesses. And sometimes, even having Messi can’t bail a team out. Argentina approached this World Cup entirely the wrong way. Iceland and Croatia made them pay for it.
(Photo: JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images)