Thank You, Messi: Football Will Never See Another One
Lionel Messi played his final game for Argentina yesterday, and international football is saying goodbye to the greatest player who has ever lived.
What makes Messi’s place in history even more convincing is the number of people who actually understand this sport at its highest level and have essentially reached the same conclusion. Pep Guardiola has called him the best player he has ever seen. Xavi has called him the greatest in history without hesitation. Thierry Henry has spoken about him as something beyond normal football. Arsène Wenger spent years marveling at what separated Messi from everyone else. Sergio Ramos spent more than a decade trying to stop him before eventually becoming his teammate. Virgil van Dijk faced him at his peak and called him the best player in the world. Even Kylian Mbappé describes Messi in practice as if he had witnessed god himself.
The list just keeps going.
Cristiano Ronaldo may be the one guy who will never admit Messi is the greatest, which I suppose is understandable considering they spent their entire careers being compared to each other.
Everybody else can see what happened.
Magic Was Never Supposed to Look Like This
What is actually insane is that Messi never looked anything like the prototype people imagine when they picture the greatest athlete a sport has ever produced.
He is about 5-foot-7 and roughly 150 pounds at most. No Greek-god physique. No overwhelming physical presence. You would never look at him walking onto a field and assume you were staring at the most dominant football player ever created.
Then the ball reaches his feet.
Everyone knows the classic Messi experience. He walks around. He watches. Sometimes he seems completely detached from the match for minutes at a time.
Then he touches the ball and magic happens.
Suddenly he looks like the quickest, strongest, smartest and most coordinated athlete on the field. Defenders know what he wants to do and still cannot stop him. Space appears where none existed. The ball seemingly becomes attached to his foot.
There has never been another player who made football look quite like this.
Barcelona Already Told Us Everything
His brilliance was known from La Masia. Barcelona brought Messi over from Rosario at 13, and once he reached the first team, it did not take long for everyone to understand what they had.
What followed should have been enough to settle his place in history forever: Barcelona’s all-time scoring record, ten La Liga titles, four Champions Leagues, eight Ballon d’Ors and some of the greatest football teams ever assembled.
Messi did not need Argentina to prove he was the greatest player ever.
Unfortunately, a lot of people decided otherwise.
For years, Argentina came painfully close and fell short, and every failure somehow became evidence against Messi.
“But he had Di María.”
“But he had Agüero.”
Cool.
Go look at the entire teams.
For years, those Argentine midfields, defenses, and goalkeepers were nowhere close to the quality of the attack. Messi was expected to create everything, score everything, and then somehow compensate for every weakness behind him.
I used to refer to Sergio Romero as the epileptic goalkeeper because every save looked like he was having a seizure trying to make it. Maybe that is harsh on Romero, but it tells you exactly how confident I was in those teams whenever Messi did not have the ball.
The Heartbreak
The lowest point was 2014.
Messi dragged Argentina all the way to the World Cup final before Germany broke their hearts in extra time through Mario Götze. Messi still won the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player, but nobody remembers him celebrating it.
They remember him staring at the World Cup trophy.
So close.
Then Argentina lost the Copa América final in 2015.
They lost another final in 2016.
After that defeat, Messi finally broke and announced that he was finished with international football.
Thank God he changed his mind.
The Ending He Deserved
Argentina finally won the Copa América in 2021.
Then came Qatar.
I genuinely believe the 2022 World Cup ended with one of the most important moments in football history: the greatest player ever finally lifting the one trophy everyone had spent his entire career telling him he needed.
Messi cried.
I cried.
I bought a framed picture of him kissing that trophy, and I still look at it every day and smile.
Because that is ultimately what Lionel Messi has always brought to football.
Joy.
Then I Saw It in Person
I did not fully understand what Messi meant to people until I watched him play in person when Inter Miami came to New England.
I have seen LeBron James play. LeBron has presence. You immediately understand that you are watching one of the greatest athletes ever.
Messi was something completely different.
It felt religious.
People were literally bowing down to him.
Many were crying.
Every time the teams switched ends, crowds moved toward whichever side Messi was attacking. People packed the aisles and barriers simply to exist closer to him for a half. Nobody seemed particularly interested in stopping it, including security, because even they appeared to understand what was happening.
And this was Lionel Messi playing in the freaking MLS.
For many people in that stadium, including myself, seeing him play football in person was one of the greatest experiences of our lives.
That is what Messi means to people. To Argentina. To Barcelona. To football supporters everywhere.
Argentina Plays for Messi
That is also why I have absolutely no patience for the nonsense about FIFA somehow engineering Argentina’s success for him.
This man spent decades experiencing international heartbreak.
World Cups ended in disappointment. Copa América finals ended in disappointment. He was relentlessly blamed for not winning with teams that had obvious flaws around him.
Then Argentina finally wins and suddenly FIFA must have handed it to Messi?
Yeah, okay.
In my eyes, Messi is the reason this generation of Argentine players becomes something different when they pull on that shirt.
These guys find another engine when they play for Argentina because of him.
Players who are good at club level suddenly look possessed internationally. They run harder. They defend harder. They fight for every ball. They will do absolutely anything to protect that shirt and give Messi another chance to win.
That is how much they respect him.
That is how much they believe they owe him.
People call Argentina dirty.
Fine.
I call it heart and grit.
That group stopped waiting for Messi to save Argentina and started playing as though their responsibility was to save Messi from another heartbreak.
And that changed everything.
One Last Time
Yesterday, at 39 years old, Messi played for Argentina for the final time.
Naturally, he could not just quietly disappear.
He scored. He assisted twice. Argentina won 3-0.
He leaves international football with 208 appearances, 126 goals, two Copa América titles and the World Cup trophy that once seemed determined to avoid him.
It is hard to imagine a more complete story.
A 5-foot-7 kid from Rosario became the greatest football player to ever walk this earth. He became Barcelona. He survived every disappointment Argentina could throw at him, came back when it would have been easier to stay retired, brought his country back to the top of the world, and became something far bigger than any club or national team.
Messi is also one of the greatest examples sports will ever give us that size means absolutely nothing compared with heart, intelligence and talent.
The smallest player on the field became the biggest figure the sport has ever known.
Thank you, Messi.
For Barcelona, Argentina, Qatar, every impossible dribble, every absurd pass, every free kick and every moment where you made millions of people wonder how the hell a human being could do what they had just watched.
International football will never be the same without Lionel Messi.
To describe his career with Argentina as anything short of perfection would be an injustice.
Enjoy international retirement, Leo.
You earned every second of it.
— Manas Jain, How’s Ya Bird