Lionel Messi’s Resilience: Turning A Penalty Shot Miss Into Two Goals

ARLINGTON, TEXAS - JUNE 22: Lionel Messi #10 of Argentina celebrates after scoring his team's second goal during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group J match between Argentina and Austria at Dallas Stadium on June 22, 2026 in Dallas, United States. (Photo by Tullio Puglia - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

FIFA via Getty ImagesArgentina’s Group Stage meeting with Austria at the 2026 World Cup could have begun with a tidy confirmation of Messi’s greatness from a very early penalty shot. Instead, it ended with a confirmation of Messi’s resilience by two majestic goals, and a team captain that seems indispensable.

>Messi missed a penalty in the ninth minute, which could have crowned him the tournament’s all-time leading scorer in the most routine way. He took it slowly, maybe too much so, and dragged his left-footed effort wide of the right post. The genius had failed, though not for the first time; he’s human, after all. But the afternoon found a deeper meaning by a slower and more rewarding road. Messi broke Miroslav Klose’s record from open play in the 38th minute and sealed a 2-0 win with a goal in stoppage time. His second goal seemed a matter of fate: despite Messi’s every effort to enable Julián Álvarez, the latter’s attempt was blocked. The build-up called for Messi to finish; his own first shot was blocked as well, only for him to step forward and complete the play with his second goal. A football alchemist, he had turned a cringy penalty miss into two cinematic goals, and a setback into the fuel for something better.

>At the end of the game, Argentina is left with the irrefutable conclusion that it has the world’s best player, and an uncomfortable concern: “what do we do without him?”

Two Kinds of Resilience: Bouncing Back and Bouncing ForwardThe management literature on resilience draws a distinction that most of us tend to blur. It separates bouncing back, the return to a prior state after a shock, from bouncing forward, the slower work of learning from adversity and emerging stronger for it. When Messi missed, he did more than recover his composure; he absorbed the disappointment and put it to use. The difference is worth dwelling on, because bouncing back lets a person or a company survive a setback, while bouncing forward is how the most durable of them turn that setback into an advantage they did not previously hold: situational awareness, knowledge, wisdom, drive.

>I don’t believe in superheroes, but I like superhero movies. The stories are inspirational, and the action sequences are thrilling. Yet, in movies, every climax is crafted by a team of professional writers, and every great action sequence is always assisted, or fully created, by CGI. But with Messi, it’s different. He writes his own story without a writer’s room, and he bends the laws of physics without visual effects. He managed it against Austria at thirty-eight, two days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, carrying a private family worry into the stadium.

>Resilience in the face of immediate setbacks and overarching pressures, the research reminds us, is a capacity we build over time that is separate from pure talent. When people and organizations have both, history is written. On Monday, the world watched a master working in that built register where talent and resilience intertwine to break records and inspire people.

The Miss That Made the Record SweeterOne detail tends to slip past the highlight reels. The same foot that now holds the record for the most goals in World Cup history had, only minutes earlier, missed its owner’s third penalty across three consecutive World Cups—against Iceland in 2018, Poland in 2022, and now Austria. The same player embodied greatness and fallibility within ninety minutes—probably the only way greatness is ever embodied is with fallibility. Resilience has nothing to do with never failing; it has to do with the steady refusal to let failure write the ending of the story.

>One can almost imagine him deciding that breaking Klose’s record shouldn’t be done from twelve yards, that the simple route belonged to someone else, and setting about claiming it the hard way.

When Genius Becomes a Liability: Argentina’s Key-Person RiskAnd yet the same record-breaking performance quietly reveals the more uncomfortable half of the story. In the language of management, the counterpart to one person’s resilience is the fragility an organization takes on when everything of consequence must pass through a single individual, a condition risk professionals call key-person risk, the human version of a single point of failure. The numbers leave little room for comfort, since Messi has scored all five of Argentina’s goals so far at this World Cup. Lionel Scaloni is well aware of the exposure, and in the years since Qatar he has tried patiently to build a way of playing that does not depend on Messi, with measurable success as shown by the 2024 Copa America win. Even so, against Austria’s relentless pressure, the defending champions spent long stretches pinned into their own half. A player of Messi’s stature makes his team better, and the team’s reliance on him gradually makes it more brittle; both are true at once. Ignoring this is how even strong organizations quietly accumulate risk. The remedy is well understood and rather unglamorous: spread the load, develop depth, build a second and a third source of goals, so that no single absence can decide a match.

The Resilience Argentina Has Yet to BuildIt is here that the football recedes and the wider lesson comes into view. Individual resilience and organizational resilience draw on different capacities, and the enterprises that last are the ones disciplined enough to cultivate both.

>Messi has mastered the first at a height very few will ever approach, and he remains, by a comfortable margin, the most compelling player of this tournament. The second belongs to Argentina and to Scaloni, and it is the more patient task: making the team’s success structural, so that it no longer rises and falls with one man’s left foot. Doing so would make Argentina more dangerous rather than less, and would, paradoxically, leave Messi freer to do even more damage, since opponents could no longer organize a whole match around a single name. On the day Argentina can turn a setback into two goals without Messi’s boot, they will have built a bullet-proof team with more chances than ever to become FIFA World Champions again. Until then, every match they play carries an unwritten clause no company would agree to put on paper: should the genius miss, the plan that remains is to hope the genius scores anyway.

>This article was originally published on Forbes.com