Why Lionel Messi's retirement announcement has the whiff of unfinished business (2024)

“Don’t try to explain Messi, don’t try to write about him, watch him,” Pep Guardiola once said when he was the Barcelona coach. Sound advice. How do you put into words the exploits of a player who, as former Argentine forward Jorge Valdano said, is “Maradona every day”?

Messi had been the best player in the world (apologies to Cristiano Ronaldo) for so long that it was almost too much to bear. A kind of fatigue sets in when you look at Messi’s numbers—672 goals and 306 assists for Barcelona, before his agonizing move away from the club whose hallowed grounds he had walked into when he was just 13 years old. He holds the records for most goals in La Liga, most goals in any European league in a single season, most hat-tricks in La Liga and the Champions League, most assists in La Liga history and most in a season, and a record seven Ballon d’Or honours.

There is surely a point where the constant dazzle becomes overwhelming, or simply relegated to the back of the consciousness out of sheer repetitiveness. Imagine if The Beatles put out the No 1 hit of the year every year for 15 years. Some of Messi’s teammates during his final season at Barca last year were mewling infants when Messi made his team debut for the club.

Yet, as Messi announced his intentions to retire from international football at the end of the World Cup in Qatar (which begins November 20), there is a sense of unfinished business, not one of loss, that arguably the greatest player ever to play the game will not be seen in the blue-and-white of Argentina. This lack of emotion is partly because of Messi’s otherworldly longevity—he has already played, at his absolute peak, for far longer than we have ever seen a great survive, let alone thrive, in the game before: Maradona every day for 15 years.

Argentina does not cry for Messi any way. In his own country, the world’s greatest player may as well be a stranger, as the football writer Wright Thompson found out while reporting for his wonderful piece 'Here & Gone', on Messi’s relationship with his hometown, Rosario. Argentines can’t really connect with the man who came from a non-descript middle-class family and left the country at the age 0f 13 to move to Spain to join La Masia, Barcelona’s academy, and is yet to return (and may never return). No one saw Messi as their own the way the Catalans did, and indeed, Messi’s identity will forever be entwined with that of Barcelona—close your eyes and imagine a Messi goal, or just Messi on the field and ask yourself, what jersey is he wearing? Yet Messi himself lived a cloistered life in Barcelona, eating in Argentinian restaurants and never picking up the Catalan dialect.

“In many ways, he is a man without a country,” writes Thompson in Here & Gone.

For Argentines, Messi is not his statistics. He is not the highest goal-scorer for his country (90, compare that to the next best, Gabriel Batistuta with 56. Maradona has 34.), nor the most capped player. He is defined by what he has not done: win a World Cup. Till last year, that negative definition was even worse—no major trophies whatsoever—till the diminutive giant led his team to their first Copa America title in 28 years, beating Brazil at the Maracana in front of pandemic-emptied stands.

To be Argentine and the greatest player in the world is to be doomed to comparisons with Maradona. Which is why, in the minds of the people, consciously or unconsciously, Messi falls short—if you haven’t dragged your team single-handedly to a World Cup trophy, what good is it winning a record number of Ballon D’Ors or scoring an insane number of goals and assists?

Everything falls short to the sheer drama, scale, and extreme emotions that Maradona and Argentina’s 1986 World Cup triumph evokes. You can be a Maradona every day and still come nowhere close.

It certainly doesn’t help that Maradona is also incomparable when it comes to the fan’s emotional connect with a player. You could see Maradona’s hardscrabble childhood in the way he walked out to the pitch and the way he played the game with his volatile heart always on his sleeve. It was all so operatic, so rich and full of the stuff of life, top of the world one day, bottom of the sewer the other, defiant, outspoken, funny, sad, and outrageously talented. Maradona, who came from nothing, lived his life like he had nothing to lose.

Messi, on the other hand, is the silent type. He is consumed by the game, his achievements relentless and almost machine-like. Outside the pitch, you don’t get to see who he is—there seems to be nothing about him that crackles, just a shy smile and muttered, monosyllabic answers.

If Messi had a passionate, fiercely loving relationship, it was with Barcelona, not Argentina. That relationship ended, spluttering to an ugly stop last year after a couple of years of things going downhill between the club and its most talismanic player. Now that’s a strange vacuum, not so much Argentina without Messi.

Of course, all of that can change if Messi leads Argentina to the World Cup title. It’s the story that every football fan, outside of their loyalties to their own national teams, would perhaps love to see. It would be a fitting ending to Messi’s incredible career. The likelihood is slim, which would make it ever so much more emotionally intense if it were to happen. Argentina had perhaps their finest squad ever in 2006 and 201o, with the likes of Juan Veron, Sergio Aguero, Javier Mascherano, Juan Riquelme, Angel Di Maria and Messi. They could not do it then. Messi came close in 2014, but Argentina lost the final to Germany. In 2018, they were dumped out in the Round of 16 with little ceremony. This time, Messi leads a largely unproven team, with some key players like Paulo Dybala and Di Maria carrying injuries heading into the tournament. The defence is a concern and the midfield is not much to talk about. And Messi has, despite his excellent season at PSG, slowed down.

Still, he is Messi.