Four more years
Lionel Scaloni is staying put. Argentina’s football federation confirmed on Thursday evening that its head coach has extended his contract until 2030, with AFA president Claudio Tapia making the announcement himself. The previous deal was due to expire at the end of December, so the clock was ticking.
Few national team coaches have argued their case so loudly with results. Scaloni was handed the job in 2018 when plenty in Argentina saw him as a stopgap. Since then he has won the Copa América in 2021, the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 and a second Copa América in 2024, before taking the team back to a World Cup final this July, where Spain beat them. Three major titles and a fourth final in five tournaments is the kind of record that ends any debate about a renewal.
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Home tournaments on the horizon
The new contract covers two events Argentina will stage. The Copa América comes to the country in 2028, and the 2030 World Cup will be shared between Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Spain, Morocco and Portugal.
Scaloni, now 48, will also have to build without the player who defined his era. This international window is his first since Lionel Messi retired from the national team. Argentina face Uruguay on Friday night, which falls in the early hours of Saturday in Europe, and then Costa Rica on Tuesday.
Continuity as a choice
The AFA had never hidden its wish to keep him, and the announcement arrived without any of the drama that sometimes surrounds the job in Buenos Aires. With a squad moving into its post-Messi phase, Tapia has backed the one constant of the last eight years.
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