BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentina is confronting a once-unimaginable actuality: a national group without soccer great Lionel Messi.
On Tuesday, 39-year-old Messi bid farewell to worldwide soccer after 21 years, 126 objectives, two Copa América titles and a World Cup championship, scoring a penalty and setting up Argentina’s other two objectives for a 3-0 victory over Benin. What was otherwise an unremarkable pleasant against the West African nation grew to become a second that this soccer-crazed nation 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 buddy’s home in Buenos Aires to watch the sport. “I’m sad. I think everyone is upset today. He will be missed.”
Argentines had an intense, usually unforgiving relationship with the shy boy who left his hometown of Rosario at 13 for the youth academy of Spanish membership Barcelona. As he grew into a world icon of near-mythical stature, his compatriots adored and abused him, sometimes questioning his dedication to his home nation and accusing him of indifference to it.
But by the time he ended his dazzling worldwide profession, his devotion to Argentina was no longer in query. Nor was Argentina’s devotion to its most well-known export, whose triumphs reminded the nation of its capability for greatness through years of political and financial 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 function in Argentine tradition. “It’s hard living in Argentina. Soccer is often one of the few things that offers you some respite, some joy.”
For years, Argentines had debated when and how Messi should depart the world stage. His Aug. 31 announcement that he’d be retiring from the national group, weeks after Argentina’s loss to Spain in the World Cup remaining, prompted an outpouring of gratitude and grief — even as Messi will proceed to gentle 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 sport — Messi’s 208th — into a national farewell billed as “the last tango.” More than 85,000 tickets to Buenos Aires’ largest stadium bought out in 90 minutes, seats that were initially priced around $60-$300 later fetching over $2,500 on resale websites. Players from Argentina’s 1978, 1986 and 2022 World Cup-winning squads returned to see him off.
After the remaining whistle, Messi’s eyes glistened as his teammates gathered around him, applauding. A rumbling refrain of “Olé, olé, olé, olé, Messi, Messi” rose from the stands as tens of hundreds of followers 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 advised 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 membership and won diehard followers from Barcelona to Bangladesh. Yet a main championship for his own nation eluded him.
Where the world saw a supernatural expertise, some at home saw an outsider who had never performed professionally in Argentina and appeared 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 normal 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 remaining in 2016, Messi briefly give up the national group.
“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, including that he identifies with Messi as a fellow teenage migrant. Rabinovich said he moved to Canada during Argentina’s 2001 financial disaster, 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 level 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 participant 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 activities sociologist at Conicet, Argentina’s national scientific analysis council. “Criticism of things off the field goes hand in hand with defeats on it.”
The World Cup victory the following 12 months in Qatar sealed his place as a national hero. Messi had delivered the one prize that had eluded him, and hundreds of thousands of Argentines poured into the streets in collective ecstasy, his identify 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 proprietor, 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 latest weeks, newspapers have hummed with nostalgic tributes and murals celebrating Messi have sprung up across the nation. La Nación, a main Argentine day by day, launched “Immortal,” a documentary chronicling his remaining World Cup run, and revealed a 196-page particular version devoted to his profession. Since June, a 26-meter (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 colours of the national flag, while information websites live-blogged every minute of the Benin pleasant as if it were a World Cup remaining.
A jersey without an inheritor
Across Argentina, followers who grew up watching Messi as their mother and father watched Maradona have lined their pores and skin with tattooed tributes to the soccer great, portraits of him kissing the World Cup trophy. It was simple to believe the world’s best participant would always be one of their own. Ahead of his farewell, Messi’s No. 10 shirt had no designated inheritor, with coach Lionel Scaloni saying the choice 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 tradition 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.”
Source hyperlink
