Lionel Messi’s farewell appearance for Argentina, against Benin, kicks off at 7pm ET, closing out an international chapter that has been shaped as much by emotion as by results.
The occasion has been framed with a now-familiar sentiment: that Messi has, in effect, completed football. Whatever weight that phrase carries, the build-up has already delivered the kind of scenes that have accompanied so much of his time in the Argentina shirt.
Messi has never been one to hide what he feels. There were tears when he briefly retired from the national team in 2016, tears when Argentina won in 2022, and, at the 2026 World Cup, tears of both joy and sadness. Today added two more entries to that archive: tears on the bus ride to the stadium, and tears during warm-ups. It is a reminder of how openly some athletes emote, and how much that openness has become part of the Messi story.
The farewell also arrives alongside a reminder of how differently his career was once read. A Guardian reader named Paul surfaced from deep in the comments section of a 20-year-old article about Messi, where a commenter writing as “snafuclarke” delivered a strikingly dismissive verdict — that Messi was “hugely overrated”, that the hype around him “has never matched his performances”, that he was too often peripheral and rarely influenced results, and that a single hat-trick did not make him a superstar. In hindsight it stands as a scorchingly poor take, the sort of judgement the years since have thoroughly overturned.