Argentina, the World Cup, and a warning for Australia

Millions of Australians woke up early on 19 July 2026 to watch the World Cup final between Argentina and Spain. The Socceroos were never in the running for the trophy, but we watched anyway – for the football and for Argentine Lionel Messi’s last dance at 39 years of age. 

He was the best player for most of the tournament, but it wasn’t enough. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 after extra time, proving that a side patiently built over years can outlast a team carried largely by brilliance and improvisation. Argentina had the talent, but it didn’t have the depth.

There’s a bigger story here than football, and it’s one worth considering in Australia.

In 1923 – a little over 100 years ago – Argentina was one of the 10 richest countries in the world. Buenos Aires was a genuine rival to Paris, its per capita income sat above France and Germany, and its beef and grain fed much of the globe. 

But by the time most of us were growing up, Argentina had become a byword for failure – nine sovereign defaults, hyperinflation that at times ran past 3,000 per cent, and a currency so unreliable that ordinary Argentines learned to convert their wages into US dollars the same day they were paid. 

It’s worth remembering that Australia and Argentina started the 20th century from almost the same position. Both were young, resource-rich nations built on agricultural exports, riding the same commodity booms, with comparable living standards and similar waves of immigration building the population. People at the time genuinely spoke of us as the two lucky countries of the New World. Australia had gold and wool where Argentina had beef and grain, but from the outside our two futures looked almost interchangeable.

So why did one country stay lucky and the other did not? In my view it comes down to one word above all others – populism.

Populism isn’t simply bad policy every now and then. It’s a pattern that keeps repeating itself because it rewards the incumbent for solving today’s problem in a way that hands a bigger problem to their successor. 

In Argentina, that pattern became almost a national habit under successive governments across the political spectrum for the best part of 70 years: They spent more than the country could afford then printed money to cover the gap, they overrode the central bank whenever it became inconvenient, and they protected industries from competition rather than exposing them to it. 

Every one of those decisions was popular in the moment it was made, but the cumulative effect was a country that never built the quiet, unglamorous credibility that turns resource wealth into lasting prosperity.

Australia has largely avoided that path, but not because we’re a different kind of country. It’s because enough of our leaders – sometimes at real political cost to themselves – chose the harder structural reform over the easier populist option when it mattered. Consider the Hawke-Keating float of the dollar and tariff reform, an independent Reserve Bank, and the discipline of putting resource windfalls into something like the Future Fund rather than spending it all in a single electoral term. These are exactly the sort of decisions Argentina’s political system was unable to sustain.

This history should make us uneasy rather than complacent, because the same populist temptations are very much alive here in 2026. Cost-of-living pressure is producing louder calls to override the Reserve Bank or to simply spend our way out of housing unaffordability. Energy policy has been stuck for the best part of two decades because no side of politics has been prepared to wear short-term pain for a durable long-term framework. Housing wealth keeps concentrating in older generations while younger Australians face a supply problem that three decades of easy, popular half measures have failed to fix. While none of this is on Argentina’s scale, it’s the same species of decision – expedient, popular and quietly compounding – that took Argentina the better part of a century to turn into a genuine crisis.

Privilege, as Argentina’s story so clearly shows, is not something a country gets to keep simply because it once had it. It must be actively defended by every generation against the pull of the easy answer, not inherited and assumed to be permanent. That, to me, is the real lesson of that World Cup final and of Argentina’s century: Talent and resources can get you to the final, but only discipline wins it.