Mbappe and Haaland delivered, but the World Cup’s day of stars belonged to Messi
Three superstars scored on the same June afternoon, and the two cast as the future both delivered. At 38, Messi still walked off with the headline.
Jun 17, 2026
Every World Cup eventually offers a day that doubles as a snapshot of where the game is. June 16 was one of those days. Kylian Mbappe scored twice, Erling Haaland scored twice, and Lionel Messi scored three times, and for one afternoon the sport’s past, present and future shared the same stage. The temptation is to call it a passing of the torch. I’m not sure the torch has gone anywhere yet.
Start with the two heirs, because they earned it. Mbappe’s brace against Senegal carried France to a winning start and pushed him past every forward in his country’s history, the brace taking him clear of Olivier Giroud as France’s all-time leading scorer at 27. On the list of World Cup scorers he is now into the company that footballers spend careers chasing. He is not a prospect anymore. He is the standard-bearer for a generation that has already arrived.
Haaland finally gets his stage
Haaland’s story is different, and in some ways more striking. For all his goals in club football, the World Cup had been the one room he had never been allowed into, Norway’s long absence keeping the most prolific striker of his age away from the tournament that makes reputations. He answered the wait with two goals on debut as Norway beat Iraq, the kind of statement that suggests he intends to make up for lost time.
Between them, Mbappe and Haaland are the argument that football has moved on, that the names which will define the next decade are already writing their chapters. And then Messi went and scored three.
The standard hasn’t moved
This is what makes Messi so difficult to file away. At 38, in his sixth World Cup, on a night when the two men cast as his successors both delivered, he produced the best individual performance of the lot and drew level with the tournament’s all-time scoring record. He did not look like a legend taking a curtain call. He looked like the best player on the field.
That is the bit I keep returning to. We have spent years being told the post-Messi era is coming, and the players tipped to lead it are genuinely that good. Yet handed the perfect stage to prove the handover, the two of them combined for four goals and the 38-year-old still walked off with the headline. The future is real. It just had to wait its turn again.
None of this lasts forever, and a single matchday proves nothing about July, let alone the years beyond it. Mbappe and Haaland will get their World Cups, probably more than one. But if June 16 was meant to be the day the game moved on, somebody forgot to tell the oldest man on the pitch.