Despite ugly ending to his Argentina career, Messi redefined beautiful game

Lionel Messi retires: Despite ugly ending, Argentine redefined beautiful game Jump to content

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Messi was a deity among Argentina’s unholy rabble

Little sorcerer calls time on playing for his country six weeks after World Cup final defeat which was marred by brutality of his team-mates

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Oliver BrownChief Sports Writer

Show biography

!Oliver Brown

Oliver Brown leads coverage of the greatest events in sport all over the world. He has reported on multiple Olympic Games, World Cups, Ashes series and Super Bowls, plus all major golf and tennis tournaments. His awards include Sports Feature Writer of the Year and Sports Interviewer of the Year. He was named Sports Journalist of the Year in 2024 by the London Press Club. You can find him on X at @oliverbrown\_tel.

Updated

31 August 2026 10:42pm BST

Published

31 August 2026 4:30pm BST

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!Lionel Messi with World Cup

*Lionel Messi celebrates after leading Argentina to World Cup glory in 2022

Credit

: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Getty Images*

Oliver BrownChief Sports Writer

Show biography

!Oliver Brown

Oliver Brown leads coverage of the greatest events in sport all over the world. He has reported on multiple Olympic Games, World Cups, Ashes series and Super Bowls, plus all major golf and tennis tournaments. His awards include Sports Feature Writer of the Year and Sports Interviewer of the Year. He was named Sports Journalist of the Year in 2024 by the London Press Club. You can find him on X at @oliverbrown\_tel.

Updated

31 August 2026 10:42pm BST

Published

31 August 2026 4:30pm BST

Lionel Messi has announced his retirement from international football.

The Argentina captain, who turned 39 in June, released a statement on social media in which he said the decision “hurt” him but the “time had come” to bring down the curtain on a storied career.

The Inter Miami forward led his national team to victory in the 2022 World Cup, and his last game for his country was the 1-0 defeat by Spain in last month’s final.

Messi, who became arguably the greatest player of all time during his 17 years at Barcelona, has retired as Argentina’s all-time leading scorer and appearance maker with 125 goals in 207 appearances.

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Despite ugly ending, Argentine redefined beautiful game

Lionel Messi’s haunted expression told you more than a three-page retirement statement, artfully displayed alongside a golden pen, ever could. Sobbing and desolate under a cloudless New Jersey sky, he understood that his last game for Argentina had also been among his worst.

Where four years earlier he had adorned the greatest World Cup final with two goals, he found no artistry to salvage this abomination of an encore, drifting into anonymity while his team-mates sparked a bare-knuckle brawl. No wonder he stood apart while Leandro Paredes and Nahuel Molina did their worst, preferring to absorb one more chorus of adoration from the blue-and-white disciples before forsaking the stage for good.

!Lionel Messi cries during the trophy ceremony at the end of the 2026 World Cup football tournament final match between Spain and Argentina

*Messi stood apart as his Argentine team-mates disgraced themselves after the 2026 World Cup final

Credit

: Paul Ellis/Getty Images*

You could make the case that Messi, as captain of an unholy rabble that had sought only to kick lumps out of Spain, should have taken a moral lead by hauling his team-mates into line, rather than reducing himself to their level by agitating to have Marc Cucurella sent off.

And yet for 20 years, the little sorcerer stayed aloof from his nation’s most lurid antics on the pitch, establishing himself as a strangely beatific presence on whom the highest ideals could be projected. Anybody who has heard Messi’s name being chanted by 50,000 fervent Argentines would have felt it. He was as close as 21st-century sport has come to a secular deity, the object of such veneration that Pope Francis felt compelled to remind Catholics that it was sacrilegious to keep calling him God.

Today, with one agonised announcement, that glorious delirium is over, and already Argentina seems not to know what to do with itself. Pablo Giralt, a sports anchor in Buenos Aires, was unable even to speak when he heard the news live on air, while shattered young fans described how they had called their parents in tears.

Everybody had known the moment was approaching, given the finality of his exit from the final and the subsequent death of his father, Jorge, but it still triggered an unbearable sense of loss.

!Lionel Messi

*Messi was extremely close to his father, Jorge, who died earlier this month

Credit

: Instagram/@leomessi*

Messi was the force who galvanised a nation, propelling his side from the unfathomable low of defeat to Saudi Arabia at the 2022 World Cup to holding the trophy aloft 26 days later. Who could ever hope to emulate him, to detonate such joy that the team’s homecoming bus parade in the capital had to be abandoned for a helicopter ride because of the millions on the streets?

!Lionel Messi leads Argentina to glory at the 2022 World Cup

*Messi led Argentina to glory at the 2022 World Cup

Credit

: Franck Fife/AFP*

“Thank you, God, for making me Argentine,” Messi wrote in his earnest sign-off, his strength of allegiance unfailing to the end. As a veteran of 207 international matches, with his last at La Bombonera distinguished by an ecstatic ovation, he understood both the passions he unleashed among his people and the extent to which his own story became that of an entire country.

You struggled to imagine what life was like in the eye of this madness, with his every move stalked. For the wonder of Messi was that the cult went beyond borders, that the joy he inspired across six World Cups made him beloved to billions. An abiding memory of the 2022 final is of the walk back to the metro station in Doha, where thousands of Nepalese and Bangladeshi supporters, all part of the vast migrant workforce that had built the stadiums, united in “Messi, Messi” refrains even at 1am.