The morning after the farewell, Argentina’s football returned to its two unanswered questions: who wears the armband, and who dares to wear the number 10. On the first, Lionel Scaloni has already decided. Cristian Romero captains the post-Messi Argentina.
Romero’s appointment follows the order Scaloni built before the Benin match: he was third in the captaincy line and led the 4-0 win over Bolivia on September 30. It is a defender’s armband, which suits the coming Argentina: the rebuild’s spine is at the back and in midfield, and Romero’s aggression sets the press that Scaloni’s system runs on. The captaincy was the easy question, because captains are chosen. Icons are inherited, which is harder.
The number 10 shirt, Scaloni says, has not been decided, and the federation held it back until the farewell rather than pass it on in the same breath. The reporting around the squad names two candidates more than others: Nico Paz, who scored from a Messi assist in the farewell itself, a piece of stagecraft so neat it looked scripted, and Franco Mastantuono. Either would wear it under the heaviest comparison in sport. The number at Argentina is not a squad slot; it is a thesis about who the team is. Maradona made it sacred, Messi made it statistical, and the next holder will be graded against both by a public that just spent an evening bowing.
The timing is both mercy and trap. Argentina reached the 2026 World Cup final, losing 1-0 to Spain, so the rebuild starts from strength rather than rubble; the champions’ core (Romero, the midfield, a settled Scaloni system) remains. But the fixture list after a farewell is merciless in a quieter way: every quiet away qualifier will be read as the sound of the post-Messi era, every new starlet measured in a currency (goals, finals, devotion) that took Messi twenty years to mint.
Scaloni’s actual job is therefore expectation management dressed as team selection. Romero gets the armband now. The shirt can wait, and should: handing it over at the farewell would have made the new boy a tribute act. The wiser craft is the one on display this week, let the nation finish grieving a genius before asking it to audition his successor. Argentina has time, talent and a system. What it no longer has is the player who made all three arguments unnecessary, and learning to win the arguments again is the work of the next four years.
