Argentina did not merely beat England in a World Cup semifinal on Wednesday. It ended the sentence England's press had been writing for a month, the one where a golden generation finally exorcises 1986 and Maradona's ghost gets a British eulogy. Instead Lionel Scaloni's side, playing without the retired talisman for the first time in a home World Cup semifinal in this cycle, walked into Wembley's away leg of the tournament calendar and closed the door with the calm of a team that has done this before, because it has. Argentina are back in a World Cup final. England are back to writing think pieces about hurt.

Alexis Mac Allister, who spent the buildup crediting his Premier League education for the tactical patience that suffocated England's midfield, is also the clearest data point in the business story sitting underneath the result: an Argentine World Cup semifinalist developed and paid by a league that isn't Argentina's, then rented out to the national team for six weeks a cycle. FIFA's international windows exist precisely to extract that value for two months without compensating the clubs that built it, and Wednesday was the return on investment nobody invoices. Argentina's final opponent gets decided this week. English football gets another Peter May Board Room to sit in and ask, again, where the money went and the trophy didn't.