How many inhabitants does a country need before we have a right to demand a footballing style? I have been thinking that as Argentina prepare for their opening game, just as I wonder that every time I think of Uruguay, who have been determined to win since the beginning of time without getting into debates about the way they do it.

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There is no need for a “how” when you have achieved something so huge as winning the World Cup twice with a population now at 3.5 million. There is a deeper culture there, too. “Garra Charrúa” – that Uruguayan warrior spirit, the name given to the way they play football – is serious: the Charrúas were natives, who stood up to the Europeans by attacking Don Juan Díaz de Solís and his landing crew who first docked on those shores in 1516. They were killed and eaten. Now, that’s a discovery. As for Uruguay’s footballing culture, that is built from the beginnings of the World Cup, with class as well as dignity and bravery.

Uruguay is called “the little country” for a reason, and it has always stood out for the surprising depth of its football and its continued prestige given that it has such a small base upon which to draw. But now even “the little country” looks big against the emergence of Iceland, a national team built upon a population of nearly 340,000 people – 10 times fewer than Uruguay – including women, children and the over‑35s. Those who are left over and have some talent are only enough to make up a handful of football teams. Those tenacious, hardworking players, who celebrate every victory as if they were conquering territory, deservedly qualified for the World Cup finals, after impressing at the last European Championship.

Iceland’s side is the daughter of scarcity, an extreme climate and a spirit of sacrifice and solidarity that, beyond playing football, enabled them to survive. An optimistic country where, the way they tell it, there is a phrase you hear repeatedly: “Everything will be OK.” Right now they are awaiting their World Cup debut against Argentina on Saturday and I hope they don’t make the mistake of thinking “everything will be OK”.

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A little respect please, Icelanders; rein yourselves in a little. Because in Argentina we have Leo Messi, a highly sophisticated creature, the culmination of genetics fed by a cultural fever that goes back more than a hundred years. Like Alfredo Di Stefáno and Diego Maradona, Messi is the final product at the end of the line. So much passion for football, so much madness, has to have some benefits.

But Iceland are coming and we’re scared because they don’t come alone. Those 23 warriors who represent a country with no standing army have 340,000 fanatics behind them, all of them dedicated to their heroes, and millions more around the world – romantics desperate for impossible things to keep happening. As John Carlin, a fine journalist who has visited the country many times, put it: they’re a people who make the most of what they can when they can and who work extremely hard. It’s a line I’d like to make my own and, without the need to add anything to it, it defines them in footballing terms too.

This generation of players will surely never be repeated but its strength is collective, constructed upon a daring, almost foolhardy sense of adventure that fills them with pride, humility, bravery and solidarity. The team spirit has made a rock of them that can be cracked by only one thing: individual talent.

In Moscow, then, there are two competing histories facing each other: that of Iceland, a small country that wants to add footballing pages to its legend, and that of Argentina, a country that has made football a way of life, of being, and that, while its politicians go asking for help from the IMF again, seeks new heroes at the World Cup. Looking at our first opponents, a martyr would do too.