BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentina is confronting a once-unimaginable reality: a national team without soccer great Lionel Messi.
On Tuesday, 39-year-old Messi bade farewell to international soccer after 21 years, 126 goals, two Copa América titles and a World Cup championship, scoring a penalty and setting up Argentina’s other two goals for a 3-0 victory over Benin. What was otherwise an unremarkable friendly against the West African nation became a moment that this soccer-crazed country had long dreaded.
“It feels like an era is ending, knowing he won’t play for the national team anymore,” said Valentino Ruso, 17, who was heading to a friend’s house in Buenos Aires to watch the game. “I’m sad. I think everyone is upset today. He will be missed.”
Argentines had an intense, often unforgiving relationship with the shy boy who left his hometown of Rosario at 13 for the youth academy of Spanish club Barcelona. As he grew into a global icon of near-mythical stature, his compatriots adored and abused him, sometimes questioning his commitment to his home country and accusing him of indifference to it.
But by the time he ended his dazzling international career, his devotion to Argentina was no longer in question. Nor was Argentina’s devotion to its most famous export, whose triumphs reminded the country of its capacity for greatness through years of political and economic instability.
“Argentines often say, ‘Thank God I was born at a time when I could experience the miracle of watching Messi play,’” said Andrés Rabinovich, a University of Chicago scholar who has researched soccer’s role in Argentine culture. “It’s hard living in Argentina. Soccer is often one of the few things that offers you some respite, some joy.”
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For years, Argentines had debated when and how Messi should leave the world stage. His Aug. 31 announcement that he’d be retiring from the national team, weeks after Argentina’s loss to Spain in the World Cup final, prompted an outpouring of gratitude and grief — even as Messi will continue to light up Major League Soccer with Inter Miami.
“I don’t know if there has ever been a love story between a player and a nation as great as the one you built,” his teammate Rodrigo De Paul wrote on Instagram.
The Argentine soccer federation turned Tuesday’s game — Messi’s 208th — into a national farewell billed as “the last tango.” More than 85,000 tickets to Buenos Aires’ largest stadium sold out in 90 minutes, seats that were originally priced around $60-$300 later fetching over $2,500 on resale sites. Players from Argentina’s 1978, 1986 and 2022 World Cup-winning squads returned to see him off.
After the final whistle, Messi’s eyes glistened as his teammates gathered around him, applauding. A rumbling chorus of “Olé, olé, olé, olé, Messi, Messi” rose from the stands as tens of thousands of fans jumped, sang and bowed toward him as if in worship. A banner at midfield proclaimed him the “Eternal Captain.”
“Even through the worst moments we went through, I never stopped fighting, battling, giving everything I had, wanting to always be here,” Messi told the crowd, which roared as if he had scored. “I love all of you, and I will miss all of you. I am proud to be Argentine.”
Winning over his own
During the 2000s and 2010s, Messi amassed trophies with his club and won die-hard fans from Barcelona to Bangladesh. Yet a major championship for his own country eluded him.
Where the world saw a supernatural talent, some at home saw an outsider who had never played professionally in Argentina and seemed to buckle under the weight of their expectations. Argentine crowds chanted “Diego, Diego,” invoking Diego Maradona, the larger-than-life hero of Argentina’s 1986 World Cup victory, and reminding Messi of a standard he had yet to meet. Messi’s quiet reserve, so at odds with Maradona’s defiant swagger, fueled doubts about his patriotism.
After Argentina lost a third consecutive final in 2016, Messi briefly quit the national team.
“There’s some resentment by the people that stay in Argentina for those who leave, this sense of, ‘They think they’re better than us,’” said Rabinovich, adding that he identifies with Messi as a fellow teenage migrant. Rabinovich said he moved to Canada during Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, around the time Messi left for Europe. “The old-school Argentines would say, ‘Diego is the Argentine. Messi is soft, a little Spanish boy.’”
The turning point came in 2021, when Argentina beat Brazil to win the Copa América, South America’s championship, for the first time in 28 years. Messi collapsed to the turf as his teammates, delirious, ran to hug him. The player long accused of feeling too little could not stop sobbing.
“Winning clearly disarmed his critics. That’s how soccer works in Argentina,” said Diego Murzi, a sports sociologist at Conicet, Argentina’s national scientific research council. “Criticism of things off the field goes hand in hand with defeats on it.”
The World Cup victory the following year in Qatar sealed his place as a national hero. Messi had delivered the one prize that had eluded him, and millions of Argentines poured into the streets in collective ecstasy, his name in their chants and his No. 10 on their backs.
“I’ll never forget it. I’d never experienced anything like that, being out there with everyone, celebrating together,” said Antonia Correa, 70, a kiosk owner, recalling that day as she waited for a bus in Buenos Aires on Tuesday. “We saw that he wasn’t just an extraordinary player, but an excellent human being.”
In recent weeks, newspapers have hummed with nostalgic tributes, and murals celebrating Messi have sprung up across the country. La Nación, a leading Argentine daily, released “Immortal,” a documentary chronicling his final World Cup run, and published a 196-page special edition devoted to his career. Since June, an 85-foot statue of Messi kneeling with the World Cup trophy has towered over passing motorists in Patagonia. On Tuesday, Buenos Aires’ landmark Obelisk glowed sky blue and white, the colors of the national flag, while news sites live-blogged every minute of the Benin friendly as if it were a World Cup final.
A jersey without an heir
Across Argentina, fans who grew up watching Messi as their parents watched Maradona have covered their skin with tattooed tributes to the soccer great, portraits of him kissing the World Cup trophy. It was easy to believe the world’s greatest player would always be one of their own. Ahead of his farewell, Messi’s No. 10 shirt had no designated heir, with coach Lionel Scaloni saying the decision would have to wait.
“I don’t think we’ll have somebody like him again, somebody with that sort of enduring power,” said Pablo Brescia, a University of South Florida professor who writes about Argentine culture and soccer. “Like Maradona, he’ll be unique — a figure that can’t be repeated.”
Messi’s contract with Inter Miami runs through the 2028 season. But the ritual of watching him carry Argentina’s hopes and anxieties into every match has ended.
“Watching Messi play, you felt anything could happen,” Murzi said. “I’ve seen him do things that I don’t think I’ll ever see another player do.”
