Argentina opened their World Cup defence with an emphatic win, but Sport experts still did not place them at No. 1 in the first FIFA standings of the tournament. After one game for each of the 48 teams, another side was judged the best in the field.
That matters now because the rankings are based only on opening matches, and the expanded 48-team World Cup gives every result immediate weight. With just one game to work from, the first sweep of the standings is less about reputation than the narrow evidence teams have already put on the table.
Lionel Messi was the face of Argentina’s start, giving them the presence and genius that usually makes them hard to look past. Even so, the opening win was not enough to carry them to the top in the ranking, which put a different team above them and left Argentina outside the No. 1 spot.
The friction is clear enough. Argentina won emphatically, yet the experts still judged at least one other team to have done more in its first match. In a tournament this short at the group stage, that kind of split between result and ranking says the early race for position is already unsettled.
The bigger picture is simple: after one match, all 48 teams have been sorted from first to last, but only three group games will decide who moves on. For Argentina, the next two matches are now about turning a strong start into something that can no longer be pushed aside by a single round of FIFA standings.
