{"id":55920,"date":"2026-07-16T07:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T07:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/55920\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T07:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T07:08:12","slug":"a-special-game-lionel-messi-relishing-facing-lamine-yamal-and-barcelona-stars-in-world-cup-final","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/55920\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A special game\u2019 \u2013 Lionel Messi relishing facing Lamine Yamal and Barcelona stars in World Cup final"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"\">\u201cIt\u2019s a huge team with fantastic players, a great style of play, a team I know well. It\u2019s a football philosophy; they\u2019ve been playing this way for many years, and I know the players,\u201d he told TyC Sports.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cI also know the players. I\u2019ve already faced many of them and I still follow them.\u00a0Some of them play for <a class=\"link \" href=\"https:\/\/sports.yahoo.com\/soccer\/teams\/barcelona\/\" data-i13n=\"sec:content-canvas;subsec:anchor_text;elm:context_link\" data-ylk=\"slk:Bar\u00e7a;sec:content-canvas;subsec:anchor_text;elm:context_link;itc:0\" data-yga=\"{&quot;yLinkElement&quot;:&quot;context_link&quot;,&quot;yModuleName&quot;:&quot;content-canvas&quot;,&quot;yLinkText&quot;:&quot;Bar\u00e7a&quot;,&quot;ySubModuleName&quot;:&quot;anchor_text&quot;,&quot;yHasCommerce&quot;:false}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Bar\u00e7a<\/a>, a club I\u2019ve always loved and followed. It will be a special, very evenly matched game.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Messi also spoke of his pride at reaching consecutive World Cup finals with Argentina.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cEverything we experienced was incredible, from the very beginning, as we said.\u00a0Although it was a football match, when we started to enter the field and during the anthem, we experienced special feelings, and the group felt that.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t just another victory; it was an important victory that the Argentine people wanted, and we wanted it too,\u00a0and it put us in another World Cup final,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cIt\u2019s crazy to play two World Cup finals in a row and nothing, this group is incredible.\u00a0Today we went looking for it again when things got tough, we never stopped believing, never stopped trying\u00a0. With our style of play, today we really put our game into it when we were down on the scoreboard. We pinned them back in their own half and it\u2019s an enormous joy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Spain beat France 2-0 in their semi-final to make it through to the final as they aim to win the World Cup for just the second time in their history. A fascinating match-up awaits on Sunday as the tournament finally reaches it conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s a huge team with fantastic players, a great style of play, a team I know well. It\u2019s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4027,549,92,332,369],"class_list":["post-55920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-barcelona","tag-argentina","tag-barca","tag-barcelona","tag-lionel-messi","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}