BUENOS AIRES, Argentina \u2014 Argentina is confronting a once-unimaginable reality: a national team without soccer great Lionel Messi.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, 39-year-old Messi bid farewell to international soccer after 21 years, 126 goals, two Copa Am\u00e9rica titles and a World Cup championship, scoring a penalty and setting up Argentina\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels like an era is ending, knowing he won\u2019t play for the national team anymore,\u201d said Valentino Ruso, 17, who was heading to a friend\u2019s house in Buenos Aires to watch the game. \u201cI\u2019m sad. I think everyone is upset today. He will be missed.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But by the time he ended his dazzling international career, his devotion to Argentina was no longer in question. Nor was Argentina\u2019s devotion to its most famous export, whose triumphs reminded the country of its capacity for greatness through years of political and economic instability.<\/p>\n
\u201cArgentines often say, \u2018Thank God I was born at a time when I could experience the miracle of watching Messi play,\u2019\u201d said Andr\u00e9s Rabinovich, a University of Chicago scholar who has researched soccer\u2019s role in Argentine culture. \u201cIt\u2019s hard living in Argentina. Soccer is often one of the few things that offers you some respite, some joy.\u201d<\/p>\n
For years, Argentines had debated when and how Messi should leave the world stage. His Aug. 31 announcement that he\u2019d be retiring from the national team, weeks after Argentina\u2019s loss to Spain in the World Cup final, prompted an outpouring of gratitude and grief \u2014 even as Messi will continue to light up Major League Soccer with Inter Miami.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if there has ever been a love story between a player and a nation as great as the one you built,\u201d his teammate Rodrigo De Paul wrote on Instagram.<\/p>\n
The Argentine soccer federation turned Tuesday\u2019s game \u2014 Messi\u2019s 208th \u2014 into a national farewell billed as \u201cthe last tango.\u201d More than 85,000 tickets to Buenos Aires\u2019 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\u2019s 1978, 1986 and 2022 World Cup-winning squads returned to see him off.<\/p>\n
After the final whistle, Messi\u2019s eyes glistened as his teammates gathered around him, applauding. A rumbling chorus of \u201cOl\u00e9, ol\u00e9, ol\u00e9, ol\u00e9, Messi, Messi\u201d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEven through the worst moments we went through, I never stopped fighting, battling, giving everything I had, wanting to always be here,\u201d Messi told the crowd, which roared as if he had scored. \u201cI love all of you, and I will miss all of you. I am proud to be Argentine.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the 2000s and 2010s, Messi amassed trophies with his club and won diehard fans from Barcelona to Bangladesh. Yet a major championship for his own country eluded him.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cDiego, Diego,\u201d invoking Diego Maradona, the larger-than-life hero of Argentina\u2019s 1986 World Cup victory, and reminding Messi of a standard he had yet to meet. Messi\u2019s quiet reserve, so at odds with Maradona\u2019s defiant swagger, fueled doubts about his patriotism.<\/p>\n
After Argentina lost a third consecutive final in 2016, Messi briefly quit the national team.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s some resentment by the people that stay in Argentina for those who leave, this sense of, \u2018They think they\u2019re better than us,\u2019\u201d 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. \u201cThe old-school Argentines would say, \u2018Diego is the Argentine. Messi is soft, a little Spanish boy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The turning point came in 2021, when Argentina beat Brazil to win the Copa Am\u00e9rica, South America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWinning clearly disarmed his critics. That\u2019s how soccer works in Argentina,\u201d said Diego Murzi, a sports sociologist at Conicet, Argentina\u2019s national scientific research council. \u201cCriticism of things off the field goes hand in hand with defeats on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll never forget it. I\u2019d never experienced anything like that, being out there with everyone, celebrating together,\u201d said Antonia Correa, 70, a kiosk owner, recalling that day as she waited for a bus in Buenos Aires on Tuesday. \u201cWe saw that he wasn\u2019t just an extraordinary player, but an excellent human being.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, newspapers have hummed with nostalgic tributes and murals celebrating Messi have sprung up across the country. La Naci\u00f3n, a leading Argentine daily, released \u201cImmortal,\u201d a documentary chronicling his final World Cup run, and published a 196-page special edition devoted to his career. 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\u2019 landmark Obelisk glowed sky blue and white, the colours of the national flag, while news sites live-blogged every minute of the Benin friendly as if it were a World Cup final.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s greatest player would always be one of their own. Ahead of his farewell, Messi\u2019s No. 10 shirt had no designated heir, with coach Lionel Scaloni saying the decision would have to wait.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll have somebody like him again, somebody with that sort of enduring power,\u201d said Pablo Brescia, a University of South Florida professor who writes about Argentine culture and soccer. \u201cLike Maradona, he\u2019ll be unique \u2014 a figure that can\u2019t be repeated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Messi\u2019s contract with Inter Miami runs through the 2028 season. But the ritual of watching him carry Argentina\u2019s hopes and anxieties into every match has ended.<\/p>\n
\u201cWatching Messi play, you felt anything could happen,\u201d Murzi said. “I\u2019ve seen him do things that I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever see another player do.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Tuesday\u2019s match finally ended, the crowd remained, their ovation roaring through the stadium. Messi took a final lap, a tiny figure beneath the lights, soaking it in. At the tunnel, he paused to lift his arms toward his fans one last time. Then he was gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BUENOS AIRES, Argentina \u2014 Argentina is confronting a once-unimaginable reality: a national team without soccer great Lionel Messi.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-923754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}