Kylian Mbappe has finished this World Cup with 10 goals and no more matches to play. Lionel Messi has eight and one match left. That is the Golden Boot race in its entirety.

How the lead was built

Mbappe's last two came in France's 6-4 defeat to England in Saturday's third-place playoff in Miami Gardens, a game that produced ten goals and settled nothing except individual records.

Those two also carried him past Messi on the all-time list, taking his career World Cup total to 22 against Messi's 21. He is 27 and has played three tournaments.

The tournament award and the career record are separate things, and this weekend has put them on different trajectories. The career record is under threat on Sunday, since Messi needs two goals in the final to reclaim it. The Golden Boot is under the same threat and the same arithmetic.

What Messi would need

Two goals draws Messi level on 10. Three wins it outright.

Level on goals is not a tie. FIFA's tiebreaker sequence goes to assists first, and then to minutes played, with fewer minutes ranking higher on the reasoning that scoring the same number in less time is the better return.

That structure is worth understanding before assuming a two-goal swing settles it. If Messi reaches 10, the award turns on assist totals that most viewers will not have been tracking, and possibly on how long each man was on the pitch across seven matches. A player who has been substituted more often can benefit.

Neither the assist tally nor the minutes comparison is something we can state with confidence tonight, so we are not going to. If the final produces a tie on goals, that is when those numbers become the story.

The awkward shape of it

A striker whose team lost the semifinal, then lost the third-place match, may finish as the tournament's leading scorer. This happens more often than the neatness of sporting narrative suggests, and it usually says something true: individual scoring records reward volume and opportunity, and a team that plays seven matches and concedes freely can offer both.

For Messi the framing is more familiar. He arrives at a World Cup final in a position to take back a record he has just lost, in what he has indicated is his last tournament. Whether he can is a separate question from whether Argentina wins, and only one of those will be remembered in a decade.

Kickoff at MetLife Stadium is 3 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, noon in Los Angeles.