World CupCoronation Complete! Lionel Messi Claims His Crown as Argentina Rejoices.

“It is our pilgrimage,” said Elsa Diaz, 70, a handywoman draped in an Argentine flag, making the same walk she made in 1978 when Argentina won its first World Cup, but this time with her 32-year-old daughter. “We are all going to the Obelisk. It is our monument, and the center of Argentina.”

In a country where soccer is religion, this was among the holiest of Sundays. And so when Gonzalo Montiel’s penalty kick hit the back of the net — vanquishing France, ending a World Cup final for the ages and bringing the championship back to this soccer-obsessed country for the first time since 1986 — Argentina was plunged into a sort of rapture.

Strangers hugged. Friends kissed. Grown men wept. And everyone shrieked. “Argentina, mi amor!” one man yelled during extra time, tears streaming down his face. “Argentina, my love!”

“Emotion, joy — and a release,” said Federico Polo, 19, right after the victory.

Thousands had gathered in Centenario Park in western Buenos Aires to watch the game on a large screen set up by the city. After the match, everyone had the same idea: Head to the Obelisk.

But the roads were jammed, the metro was shut down and the city buses were parked. So they walked.

“The entirety of Argentina is on this avenue right now,” said Sergio Gutierrez, 46, a drugstore worker banging a drum, who walked with his wife and three children down Corrientes Avenue, a famed thoroughfare closely associated with the tango for the many theaters and dance halls that line the way. “We will walk until we can’t get any farther.”

The walk from the park would take 70 minutes, according to Google Maps, but the avenue was jammed, the pace was slow, and there were plenty of distractions along the way.

Every woman who looked to be of grandmother age was serenaded with a chant that has become a rallying cry of this year’s World Cup in Argentina: “Abuela, la, la, la, la, la.” The chant, of the Spanish word for grandmother, began in Buenos Aires after one of Argentina’s victories, when a group of young men sang it to a dancing older woman who wore a medical mask and wrapped herself in a flag.

“She still doesn’t know why everyone is singing to her but she loves it,” said Silvia Belvedere of her 89-year-old mother, Nelida Peralta, who was standing on the sidewalk along the procession, gripping a cane and waving two small Argentina flags. As the procession passed, each group that noticed her stopped to serenade her and take photos.

“I’m so happy,” Ms. Peralta said. “I can’t go there, so I’m staying here waving the flag.”

Farther down the avenue, a group of Bangladeshi immigrants were greeted warmly by the marching fans. Bangladesh’s love for Argentina’s national soccer team has become a major storyline here, and so Argentines parading down the route stopped for photos and high fives. One of the men from Bangladesh, who said he had lived in Buenos Aires for 24 years, said he had never felt more connected to his adopted home.

Along the route, Argentines expressed their joy with whatever was at hand. Cars stuck at intersections watching the procession beeped incessantly; one man banged a pan with a spoon. And over and over again, the crowd sang this year’s anthem of the Argentina national team, “Muchachos, Ahora Nos Volvimos A Ilusionar” — or “Guys, Now We’re Getting Excited Again.”

The song has become a sort of celebratory hymn in Argentina over the past several weeks, and it speaks of Argentina’s late soccer star, Diego Maradona, a sort of deity in this country, looking down from the sky to help Messi and his teammates bring Argentina another World Cup. After the song’s prediction came to fruition on Sunday, it was the soundtrack of the march.

As the Obelisk came into view, the crowd thickened. A city bus that had been abandoned in the middle of the street had more than a dozen revelers dancing atop it. Elsewhere, men hung from light poles, and people climbed to the roof of a restaurant via a ladder that created a sort of bridge between the restaurant and the top of a newsstand.

Some people had already been to the Obelisk and were heading the other way, their pilgrimage complete. A man with his face and chest painted blue and white looked drained. “My throat hurts from screaming,” said Pedro Humberto Aguilar, 51, behind blue-tinted shades.

The procession ended at Republic Plaza, a sea of celebration in every direction. Every avenue leading to the plaza was clogged with revelers. From above, the plaza was an expanse of humanity, hundreds of thousands of people, interspersed with waving flags and occasional fireworks.

Through the rapturous cacophony, the anthem could be made out here and there.

Over and over again, revelers belted out the lyrics, which try to convey Argentina’s intense love for its soccer team.

“I can’t explain it to you,” they sang, “because you won’t understand.”

Macarena Funes and Valeria Dorrego contributed reporting.

But on Sunday night, as the fireworks filled the sky above Lusail, as the Argentina fans sang and their star, Lionel Messi, beamed while clasping a trophy he had waited a lifetime to touch, everyone knew Qatar.

The spectacular denouement — a dream final pitting Argentina against France; a first World Cup title for Messi, the world’s best player; a pulsating match settled after six goals and a penalty shootout — made sure of that. And as if to make sure, to put the nation’s final imprint on the first World Cup in the Middle East, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, stopped a beaming Messi as he made his way to collect the biggest trophy in the sport and pulled him back. There was one more thing that needed to be done.

He pulled out a golden fringed bisht, the black cloak worn in the Gulf for special occasions, and wrapped it around Messi’s shoulders before handing over the 18-karat gold trophy.

The celebration ended a tumultuous decade for a tournament awarded in a bribery scandal; stained by claims of human rights abuses and the deaths and injuries suffered by the migrant workers hired to build Qatar’s $200 billion World Cup; and shadowed by controversial decisions on everything from alcohol to armbands.

Yet for one month Qatar has been the center of the world, pulling off a feat none of its neighbors in the Arab world had managed to achieve, one that at times had seemed unthinkable in the years since Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president, made the stunning announcement inside a Zurich conference hall on Dec. 2, 2010, that Qatar would host the 2022 World Cup.

It is improbable the sport will see such an unlikely host again soon. Qatar was perhaps among the most ill-suited hosts for a tournament of the scale of the World Cup, a country so lacking in stadiums and infrastructure and history that its bid was labeled “high risk” by FIFA’s own evaluators. But it took advantage of the one commodity it had in plentiful supply: money.

Backed by seemingly bottomless financial resources to fuel its ambitions, Qatar embarked on a project that required nothing less than the building, or rebuilding, of its entire country in service to a monthlong soccer tournament. Those billions were spent within its borders — seven new stadiums were constructed and other major infrastructure projects were completed at enormous financial and human cost. But when that was not enough, it spent lavishly outside its boundaries, too, acquiring sports teams and sports rights worth billions of dollars, and hiring sports stars and celebrities to support its cause.

And all that was on display Sunday. By the time the final game was played in the $1 billion Lusail Stadium, Qatar could not lose. The game was being shown across the Middle East on beIN Sports, a sports broadcasting behemoth set up in the aftermath of Qatar’s winning the World Cup hosting rights. It also could lay claim to the two best players on the field, Argentina’s Messi and the French star Kylian Mbappé, both of whom are under contract to the Qatar-owned French club Paris St.-Germain.

Mbappé, who had scored the first hat trick in a final in over a half-century, finished the game sitting on the grass, consoled by President Emmanuel Macron of France, an invited guest of the emir, as Argentina’s players danced in celebration all around him.

The competition delivered compelling — and sometimes troubling — story lines from the outset, with the intensely political opening at Al Bayt Stadium, an enormous venue designed to look like a Bedouin tent. That night, Qatar’s emir had sat side by side with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, less than three years after the latter had led a punishing blockade of Qatar.

For a month, deals were discussed and alliances were made. Qatar’s team was not a factor in its World Cup debut; it lost all three of its games, exiting the competition with the worst performance of any host in the competition’s history.

There would also be other challenges, some of Qatar’s own making, like a sudden prohibition on the sale of alcohol within the stadium perimeters only two days before that first game — a last-minute decision that left Budweiser, a longtime sponsor of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, to fume on the sideline.

On the tournament’s second day, FIFA crushed a campaign by a group of European teams to wear an armband to promote inclusivity, part of efforts promised to campaign groups and critics in their home countries, and then Qatar quashed efforts by Iranian fans to highlight ongoing protests in their country.

But on the field, the competition delivered. There were great goals and great games, stunning upsets and an abundance of surprising score lines that created new heroes, most notably in the Arab world.

First came Saudi Arabia, which can now lay claim to having beaten the World Cup champion in the group stage. Morocco, which had only once reached the knockout stage, became the first African team to advance to the semifinals, pulling off a succession of barely believable victories over European soccer heavyweights: Belgium, Spain and then Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal.

Those results sparked celebration across the Arab world and in a handful of major European capitals, while also providing a platform for fans in Qatar to promote the Palestinian cause, the one intrusion of politics that Qatari officials did nothing to discourage.

In the stands, the backdrop was a curious one, with several games appearing short of supporters and then mysteriously filling up in the minutes after kickoff, when gates were opened to grant spectators — many of them the South Asian migrants — entry free of charge. The true number of paying spectators is unlikely to ever be known, their empty seats filled by thousands of the same laborers and migrants who had built the stadium and the country, and who kept it running during the World Cup.

That group, largely drawn from countries like India, Bangladesh and Nepal, was the most visible face of Qatar to the estimated one million visitors who traveled to the tournament. They worked as volunteers at stadiums, served the food and manned the metro stations, buffed the marble floors and shined the hand rails and door knobs at the scores of newly built hotels and apartment complexes.

By the end of the tournament, most of those fans had gone, leaving the Argentines — an estimated temporary population of 40,000 — to provide the sonic backdrop to the final game. Dressed in sky blue and white stripes, they converged on the Lusail Stadium, creating the type of authentic World Cup atmosphere — bouncing and singing throughout 120 minutes of play, and then long afterward — that no amount of Qatari wealth could buy.

They had gotten exactly what they wanted from the World Cup. And so did Qatar.

The rest seemed to play out in fast motion. Lionel Messi of Argentina scored another goal in extra time to give his team the lead. Mbappé scored in response. When the tie could not be broken, Mbappé scored to open the penalty shootout. Messi followed and did the same. Then came two France misses, three Argentina makes and it was over.

That was how Mbappé found himself sitting on the grass near the midfield stripe wondering how it could have all gone so wrong, then so right, and then so painfully, so permanently wrong. It would take a moment to process that. The president would have to wait.

“Kylian has really left his mark on this final,” Mbappé’s coach, Didier Deschamps, said. “Unfortunately, he didn’t leave it in the way he would have liked. That’s why he was so disappointed at the end of the night.”

The story of Sunday’s World Cup final, arguably the best in the tournament’s history, was always going to be about Messi’s quest for the one title that had eluded him in his career. But Mbappé had come to Lusail with history and victory in his sights, too. He had his own story to write.

Mbappé had already experienced the feeling of winning the World Cup. In 2018, he and France lifted the trophy in Moscow, where Mbappé had become the first teenager since Pelé to score in the final. On Sunday, he was hoping to match Pelé again and make France the first country to retain the trophy since Pelé’s Brazil in 1962.

He had already done Pelé one better before the game went to penalty kicks: Not even the Brazilian great had ever scored a hat trick in a World Cup final. Mbappé’s was the first since 1966.

Mbappé, 23, will have known that. He is not just one of the world’s best players. He is also a student of the game and its history and its stars. For months he had been targeting Qatar as the moment, and the place, where he closed the gap with Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the debate over the best player in the game.

In an interview with The New York Times this summer, he was quick to recall the number of times each of his rivals had been named world player of the year. He knew he already had something on his résumé that they did not — a World Cup title — and he knew that a second in a row would be a feat even they could never match.

“I always say I dream about everything,” Mbappé said at the time. “I have no limits. So of course, like you say, it’s a new generation. And Ronaldo, Messi — you’re gonna stop. We have to find someone else, someone new.”

Mbappé thought that he was that someone else. His performance on Sunday made it seem more like a prediction than a boast: a penalty kick coolly dispatched in the 80th minute, after his teammate Randal Kolo Muani was knocked down from behind in the box; a second goal just over a minute later, a sliding right-footed finish after a give-and-go with Marcus Thuram at the top of the area; and a second penalty three minutes before the end of extra time, after Messi, for the second time, had given Argentina the lead and the momentum.

“They managed to get us back in the match, to keep the dream alive,” Deschamps said. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t achieve the dream.”

The penalties finished the game and the story. Mbappé eventually rose from the grass, lifted by a hand from Argentina’s goalkeeper, Emiliano Martínez, and eventually took a moment to share an embrace, and a few words, with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. But even his moment of personal triumph seemed cruel.

His three goals gave him eight for the tournament, edging Messi by one for the Golden Boot as the World Cup’s top scorer. But it also meant he had to walk onstage three times: first to collect the award, then to return to pose for photos and then a third time to receive his silver medal.

Each time, he made the long walk across the curling white stage. Each time, he passed the golden World Cup trophy. Each time, it was close enough to touch.

On Sunday, it was there for the taking. He will have to wait four years to get that close again.

Twice France rallied to tie the match, including in the 118th minute, before losing on penalty kicks. And by then rain was falling outside the once-boisterous bars, in keeping with the national sentiment. For the first time since the World Cup began, the streets did not echo with honking after a match and the grand, decorated Champs-Élysées did not throb shoulder-to-shoulder with revelers.

“It’s just terrible,” said Maximilien Bago, a 23-year-old business student, who moments before had been bouncing exuberantly in a wig-like hat matching the national colors. The eyes of the fans around him swelled with tears. “But that’s soccer,” he said.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, a soccer fan who was in Qatar to watch the match, waded onto the field to console Kylian Mbappé, the star forward who scored three goals, including two in quick succession that turned what looked like a rout for Argentina into one of the most dramatic matches in World Cup history.

“We were so close,” Mr. Macron told reporters, adding that the team had “made us incredibly proud.”

“We are a great soccer nation, we are also a great nation,” said the president. “What this game tells us is that nothing is ever a foregone conclusion.”

Many French cities had chosen not to put up screens or create fan zones, in protest of the environmental and ethical record of the tournament’s host, Qatar, even before the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine put France and the rest of Europe into power-saving mode.

Instead, many fans jammed into bars and friends’ apartments to watch the game.

“This match was eternal, exceptional, historic,” said Matthieu Couranjou, 52, a telecoms engineer at the French Culture Ministry who welcomed friends to his apartment in the Bastille neighborhood. Eruptions of joy after Mbappé’s third goal tied the match gave way to stunned silence after France lost in penalty kicks. “We went down fighting.”

In Grenoble, a large city in southern France, supporters with French flags draped over their shoulders and painted on their faces pressed against the windows of packed pubs to watch the game. Small fireworks were fired as people climbed trees, stood on tables or climbed on friends’ shoulders.

The mood of the crowd there — and across the country — ebbed and flowed with their team’s fortunes, from silence as France fell behind 2-0, to raucous cheers during their comeback, to silence again with a 3-2 deficit in extra time, to cheering again when Mbappé tied the match again. At last came deafening silence as France fell on penalty kicks.

“It’s too bad,” said 19-year-old Aurélien Delavay, who looked lost, his hands buried in his pockets, his face down. “We would have made history,” he added, referring to France’s chance to become the first team in a half-century to retain its World Cup title.

“But Argentina also deserved this victory,” he added. “Bravo to them.”

Lionel Messi scored the opening goal, after Ángel Di María won what was admittedly an extremely soft penalty, and then set in motion another — a flowing attack finished by Di María that will go down as a bona fide classic World Cup goal.

Argentina has kept Kylian Mbappé not just quiet but essentially silent. It has forced Didier Deschamps, the French coach, into a double substitution before halftime, which can be simultaneously regarded as bold, decisive action, a commendable decision that he had got his setup for the game wrong, and a form of blind panic.

France carries enough of a threat, though, for Argentina to be at least a little wary of what happens from here on. It has just 45 minutes to hold on to win the World Cup for a third time, to give Messi the crowning glory of his career. But those 45 minutes are likely to feature wave after wave of French attacks, led by some of the most devastating players on the planet.

The weather for game day? High 70s. Hardly a cloud in the sky.

The energy has been palpable all week in Argentina. Streets are adorned with blue-and-white flags, Argentines are wearing blue-and-white jerseys and that World Cup anthem is on repeat.

Argentina’s love for soccer can be difficult to overstate. On Tuesday, during the semifinal match against Croatia, a man was arrested just west of Buenos Aires for hijacking a city bus. The driver had stopped to buy something at a store, according to a police report. The man, worried he would miss the game, hopped into the seat and started driving. (He ended up spending the game in jail.)

Argentina’s love for soccer has long been represented in an idolization of one man: Maradona. Beyond being regarded as perhaps the world’s best soccer player and having won the nation its last World Cup title in 1986, Maradona also had a romantic rags-to-riches story of a boy who grew from playing on the dirt fields of a Buenos Aires slum to dominating at the top of the soccer world.

Now there is another Argentine who appears to be taking his place alongside Maradona. Lionel Messi is also in the conversation for being the game’s best player, but his personal journey has been less intriguing to Argentines. At 13, he left the country for Spain to train and never lived there again.

But now, in his final World Cup after an already stellar career, he is on the verge of bringing Argentina its third World Cup two years after Maradona’s death.

If he pulls it off, Argentines might see the tale not just as a storybook ending, but perhaps as a biblical one.

Its popularity, doubtless, has something to do with the fact that its two verses hit all the major notes of Argentina’s campaign: it is a homage not only to Messi but to Diego Maradona; it pays tribute to the Argentine soldiers who died during the Falklands War of 1982; it draws in the country’s various disappointments in international tournaments in recent years; and it goes into its key change with a taunt directed at Argentina’s major soccer rival, Brazil.

But it is also a familiar tune to most Argentine fans. Various Argentine club teams have their own bespoke versions of Muchachos, Esta Noche Me Emborracho, a 2003 hit for the rock band La Mosca Tsé tsé, led by the 62-year-old singer Guillermo Novellis. A (relatively) cursory attempt to trace its genealogy would suggest that fans of Boca Juniors were the first to adapt the melody for their own purposes, in this case mocking its fierce rival, River Plate. Within a couple of years, Racing Club, a team in Avellaneda, had an interpretation, quickly followed by its rival, Independiente. In the endless round of call and response that marks Argentine fan culture, both were dedicated to denigrating the other. The most famous iteration, though, probably belonged to River Plate.

That it became something approaching a national anthem is down, largely, to a 30-year-old teacher named Fernando Romero. Together with a friend, he changed the lyrics once more in the days after Maradona’s death last year, turning it into a tribute to the player widely regarded as either Argentina’s first or second greatest. When the two friends were filmed singing it outside River’s Monumental stadium, during a game against Bolivia, the footage quickly went viral. Messi became aware of it: he named it, soon after, his favorite soccer chant. So, too, did Novellis, who got in touch with Romero and volunteered to record and release a version with his lyrics in the buildup to the World Cup.

Even Novellis, though, is a little surprised by its success. La Mosca has a curiously fitting relationship with soccer. Maradona was such a fan that he invited the band to play his 40th birthday party in 2000. And seven years later, another devotee asked if they would do a turn at his 20th birthday party. Messi and Novellis have been in occasional contact ever since.

Now, the song has not only reverberated around Lusail, again and again, on Argentina’s way to the final, it is currently number one on Spotify in Argentina. It has been streamed 4.4 million times in just a few weeks. (The original is currently at almost 14 million.) Novellis has been interviewed by media outlets across the world; a campaign was launched to fly Romero to Qatar, though he turned it down, suggesting the country had “more important things to address.” The story, as Novellis told La Nacion, is “easy to explain, but difficult to understand.”

France’s lineup:

Hugo Lloris (c); Jules Koundé, Raphael Varane, Dayot Upamecano, Théo Hernandez; Aurélien Tchouaméni, Adrien Rabiot, Antoine Griezmann; Ousmane Démbelé, Olivier Giroud, Kylian Mbappé.

France’s road to the final already had been dogged by injuries (its best striker, Karim Benzema, pulled out after arriving in Qatar, and left back Lucas Hernandez went out early and never returned) before sickness threatened to derail its title challenge.

“It’s flu season, and in that sense, we have to be careful,” Coach Didier Deschamps had said earlier this week. “And also, the players have put in a huge shift and their immune system might be a little run down.”

But then three more players — defenders Raphaël Varane and Ibrahima Konaté and forward Kingsley Coman — missed training on Friday. Deschamps, though, has shrugged it all off. Of the virus sweeping through his team, he said, “We’re not worried, really.”

Maybe he isn’t. The fitness of the returnees will be worth watching, though.

“I had a very difficult time for the last year and a half,” Marciniak said. His diagnosis forced him to miss the last European Championship, which he called “a terrible feeling,” but said that now “I cannot even stop smiling because it’s a great feeling.”

Marciniak has already refereed games involving both finalists: He was in charge when France beat Denmark in the group stage, and again for Argentina’s victory over Australia in the round of 16.

He will lead an all-Polish crew of linesman in the final, though the fourth official will be an American, Ismael Elfath. Another Pole, Tomasz Kwiatkowski, will serve as the video assistant referee.

Only five red cards have ever been shown in a World Cup final, but two of those went to Argentines (Pedro Monzón and Gustavo Dezotti, both in the 1990 final) and two others went to Frenchmen (Marcel Desailly in 1998 and Zinedine Zidane, for his infamous head butt against Italy in 2006).

There have been only five red cards at this World Cup, and two of those were shown after play had ended. The only players sent off during matches were Wayne Hennessey of Wales, for a violent foul after he charged out of his penalty area against Iran; Vincent Aboubakar of Cameroon, who got his second yellow card and was sent off against Brazil for removing shirt after he scored a late goal; and Walid Cheddira of Morocco, who got two yellows in about two minutes as his team closed out its win over Portugal in the quarterfinals.

The other two reds came after the whistle: to South Korea Coach Paulo Bento, who confronted the referee after a loss to Ghana in the group stage; and to Netherlands defender Denzel Dumfries, who was sent off after his country’s ill-tempered loss to Argentina on penalty kicks in the quarterfinals.

Argentina. France.

Between them, eight World Cup finals (10 once this game starts). Two championships each.

Lionel Messi. Kylian Mbappé.

The best of all time against the best of this time, both employed by Paris St.-Germain … which just happens to be owned by Qatar.

France can become the first nation since Brazil, in 1958 and 1962, to win consecutive titles. That’s Péle territory. Argentina, meantime, can become the first nation to spontaneously combust before it can host a victory parade. It would vanish, cease to exist, leaving a crater the approximate shape of Messi’s profile.

This is not the World Cup of Messi because it will be his last, which he confirmed the other night, but because he has defied age, opposition and unfathomable pressure to lead his homeland to the final match.

Five goals, three assists, many spun out of nothing but imagination and faith. These moments — like his preposterous dribbling demonstration against Croatia, or his mind-melting pass against the Netherlands — just appear. And they have appeared in every match, at critical junctures, yoking Argentina to the precipice of forever.

That France achieved this stage despite lengthy lapses in the knockout rounds indicates a worrisome susceptibility to loose and passive stretches. Or, perhaps, that Les Bleus — even with Mbappé dazzling and Antoine Griezmann creating and Olivier Giroud prowling — have yet to crackle with full intensity. And, if (when?) that happens, oooooooohhhhh boy.

This is the last World Cup for so many, and of so much: for Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, Luka Modric and Dani Alves, for a tournament that will expand to 48 nations for 2026. And this final, then, oozing with soccer royalty, is a fitting send-off for a glorious, complicated spectacle conjured in a desert: Either France or Argentina is one victory from immortality, the best kind of permanence.

A few days in, a sixth player, Lucas Hernandez, fell by the wayside. Deschamps — a man with an intense, deadpan demeanor that is only slightly undercut by a shy, coquettish laugh — did not even pretend to be flustered. Fine. If that’s how you want to play it, he’ll just go and become the first manager to retain the men’s World Cup in half a century despite being a player down. He did not bother summoning a replacement.

None of it has stopped France’s serene progress to a second successive final, of course. But it is not quite true to say that those absences have not affected Deschamps’s team in Qatar. While the French may have barely broken a sweat on their way to the quarterfinals, they were worried against both England and Morocco. There were, in fact, fairly long stretches of both games when the reigning champion was on the back foot.

France won the World Cup in 2018 without being thrilling; that team gave the impression that it always had another gear. This one, stripped of several key players, has looked just a little like it has reached its edge.

Against Morocco, France had been deprived of two more players: Both Adrien Rabiot and Dayot Upamecano were absent, suffering from a virus. It has been reported in France that the virus was contracted from England’s players during the quarterfinal, although the evidence for that claim is scant, at best. (A respiratory virus has been circulating in Doha all tournament; doctors, generally, have attributed it not to air conditioning, the diagnosis of at least one Brazilian wing, but to the influx of more than a million people to the city.)

Wherever the virus came from, in the days that have followed France’s semifinal, three more players have fallen victim to it: Raphaël Varane, Ibrahima Konaté and Kingsley Coman all missed training on Friday, 48 hours before the World Cup final. It is not in-depth soccer journalism to suggest that is not really ideal.

“Obviously, it would be better if this was not happening,” Deschamps said on Saturday, a remark that is impressively phlegmatic, even by his standards. “We are handling it as well as possible. We are trying to take as many precautions as we can, to adapt as necessary and get on with it.” France has done all it can to mitigate the spread, isolating certain players and introducing social distancing for others.

Assuming those measures work, Deschamps still finds himself in a complicated position. All of those players laid low by illness will wake up on Sunday morning adamant that they can play. They will report to France’s medical staff that their symptoms have entirely disappeared. Deschamps will hope, of course, that they are right: He will not want to go into a World Cup final without his three first-choice central defenders.

The problem is working out how much he can trust his players’ testimonies, and their instincts. Physical tests might suggest some, or all, of them are fit enough to start, but will fatigue set in quicker than normal? Will they be able to perform to the very best of their abilities, in the (joint) biggest game of their lives if they are still dealing with the aftereffects of a virus?

And if they cannot, what alternatives does he have? France produces players in such industrial quantities these days that it has long felt as if the country could send two teams to a World Cup, each of them capable of winning the whole thing. Now does not really feel the best time to test that theory.

After a short break, the teams will play two 15-minute extra periods, including any minutes of added time the officials deem necessary. There is no sudden death: Both periods are played to their conclusion, regardless of how many goals are scored (or not).

If the teams are still tied after extra time, they go to a penalty kick shootout.

In that, a coin flip decides which side goes first. The teams then pick five penalty takers, and they alternate attempts until a winner is determined. That can take as few as three rounds of attempts — if, for example one team converts its first three and its opponent misses all three — or as many as … well … as many as it takes.

That can sometimes take a while, and the longer it goes, the more fun it gets.

Except for the people involved.

World Cups, of course, have always had that purpose. Just as they are the forge of greatness, they act, too, as the place it takes its bow.

In that light, this World Cup is no different from any other. And yet the sheer numbers suggest something different. They give the impression that soccer will go into the tournament with one elite and emerge from it with quite another. That is not because there is a greater proportion of famous players at the end of their career than normal. It is because there are more famous players, full stop.

It is likely that the last 15 years will come to be seen almost exclusively through the lens of Messi and Ronaldo, the two players who have defined it. Such an interpretation, though, would be reductive. It is better thought of, instead, as soccer’s first truly global age: an era in which fans across the world could watch almost every second of a player’s career, in which the great and the good encountered one another with unprecedented frequency in the Champions League and came into our homes through video games, a time when rare talent clustered together at a handful of superclubs.

The generation that will exit the stage in Qatar is the last bastion of the first generation of players who started and ended their journeys in that ecosystem.