Argentina's 19 Goals: FIFA Charges £60 to Watch

Argentina 19 goals. Spain in the other dugout. Sunday's World Cup final in Los Angeles is set — and the tournament has already told us everything we need to know about who deserves to be there.

Nineteen goals in six matches. That is not a statistic — that is a statement of intent from a nation that arrived in North America not to participate but to consume. Argentina have been the tournament's great force of nature, a side that plays with the kind of collective fury that makes neutral observers forget they picked a side. Watch the compilation of all nineteen and you understand immediately: these are not goals that happened to Argentina. Argentina willed them into existence.

Lionel Scaloni has built something that functions like a symphony orchestra playing jazz — structured enough to be reliable, loose enough to be dangerous, and always, always aware that the soloist needs space when the moment arrives. What Scaloni knows that his players perhaps don't is that nineteen goals means nothing if the twentieth doesn't come on Sunday. He will not tell them that. He will let them feel invincible until precisely the moment he needs them to feel focused.

Meanwhile, eleven stoppage-time winners across this entire tournament tell their own story about what a World Cup really is. It is not ninety minutes — it is ninety-three, ninety-five, ninety-seven. It is the moment when preparation runs out and character takes over. Argentina have been on the right side of those moments. They have the psychological architecture of champions.

And then there is FIFA — reliable as gravity and twice as heavy — charging journalists £60 for a seat at Rio Ferdinand's press conference ahead of the final. Sixty pounds. To watch a pundit speak. There is a metaphor buried in there about how football's governing body views the people who cover its greatest spectacle, but the metaphor costs extra.

The Falklands banner that appeared in Argentina's semi-final celebrations is heading toward a FIFA disciplinary process — the kind that produces fines that wealthy federations pay with the mild inconvenience of finding the right drawer. The banner will be remembered long after the punishment is forgotten. Political theatre on the world's largest sports stage is as old as the world's largest sports stage. Argentina know this. They have always known how to make noise in both languages.

Sunday's final is Argentina against Spain. Nineteen goals against a defence that conceded nothing against France in Dallas. An irresistible force and an immovable object, arranged on grass, for the entire watching world.

Forty years of covering this sport and the mathematics still feels impossible. That is why it matters.