Argentina play Bolivia on Wednesday and nobody will be wearing the number 10. That is not an oversight. Lionel Scaloni has decided to leave the shirt empty until Lionel Messi's farewell match, and he did not dress the decision up.
"We aren't obligated to assign it for these matches, so we won't give it to anyone until Leo's farewell game," he said. Messi, who is 39, will play that game against Benin on 7 October at the Monumental in Buenos Aires, finishing with 125 international goals.
A squad number is the easy problem
Leaving a shirt unworn for a few weeks costs nothing. It buys goodwill, it reads well, and it will be forgotten by November.
Replacing what the player in it actually did is the harder job, and Scaloni was noticeably careful about how he described that part.
"We'll find a way to play differently," he said. "That's what these matches are for, to experiment." He added that Argentina will keep the ball-control philosophy that has defined his time in charge while testing new approaches in attack. That is the balance he has to strike. Throw out the system and you lose what made the team good. Keep it unchanged and you have a structure built around a player who has gone.
The names getting a look
Nico Paz, Roman Vega, Santiago Castro and Valentin Barco are all expected to feature across this window, with Burkina Faso to follow on Sunday. None of them is being asked to be Messi. That is the only sensible way to handle it, because Argentina spent the best part of twenty years with an answer to every problem standing in roughly the same part of the pitch, and a squad does not unlearn that in a fortnight.
Now they find out what they look like without one.
Two friendlies, low stakes, real information
Bolivia and Burkina Faso are not the opponents that will tell Scaloni whether this works. They are, however, the only opponents available before the questions become serious, and a coach who has won a World Cup has earned the right to use them as a laboratory rather than a scoreline.
What he is looking for is probably not a single replacement at all. It is a way of making chances that does not route everything through one man, and that takes a great deal longer than two friendlies to build.
This week is where it starts.
Context: Argentina face Bolivia on Wednesday and Burkina Faso on Sunday, the first fixtures after Lionel Messi's international retirement. Messi, 39, plays a farewell match against Benin on 7 October at the Monumental, Buenos Aires, ending with 125 international goals. Scaloni has confirmed the number 10 shirt will remain unassigned until then. Nico Paz, Roman Vega, Santiago Castro and Valentin Barco are expected to feature.
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