The Athletic has live coverage of Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami debut.
On one sweaty summer evening in New Jersey, Lionel Messi hit rock bottom.
It was late June 2016 and outside Argentina’s dressing room in the MetLife Stadium, the disconsolate captain of this defeated team said: “That’s it. It’s over for me.”
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Messi was 29. He didn’t plan on playing for Argentina again. “It’s the best thing for everyone, for me, for the people who want it. I tried many times (to be champion) but it didn’t happen.”
In the shootout to decide the centenary edition of the Copa America, Messi missed Argentina’s first penalty. After skying his spot kick high and wide, he pulled at his jersey and grimaced. When Lucas Biglia’s attempt was saved by Chile goalkeeper Claudio Bravo, he ran his hand through his hair in disbelief and sat in the dug-out, a maelstrom of emotions hidden behind a blank stare.
This was the fourth final Messi had lost with Argentina; the third in three years after the 2014 World Cup and 2015 Copa America. The three-peat of disappointment cut Messi to his core. He was at his peak and had already won five of his seven Ballons d’Or. But it didn’t matter. Success with his country continued to elude him and Argentines became more and more convinced a maleficio loomed over the national team, a hex not even someone of Messi’s powers could lift. A cruel irony was to be found in the Chile team that kept getting the better of them in the Copa America. It was coached by one Argentine after another; Marcelo Bielsa, Jorge Sampaoli and Juan Antonio Pizzi.
What then was holding Argentina back? La Nacion, one of Argentina’s biggest-selling newspapers, decried the “endless nightmare” of 23 years without an international trophy. And though it did end at the Copa America in Rio in 2021, and Argentina could start dreaming of the World Cup in Doha the following winter, there was a time when the fulfilment Messi pursued on the international stage no longer looked like his destiny. On the contrary, that night in New Jersey it looked like it might never happen for him. In the way it never happened for other players who defined eras with their clubs rather than their countries, such as the great Alfredo Di Stefano.
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“Don’t go Leo” trended on Twitter. Messi must have seen the hashtag. It was mentioned more than 10m times in the space of 24 hours. By the time the Argentina squad next got together, two months later, he was back, his short-lived retirement over. The Argentine Football Association (AFA) breathed a sigh of relief. Without Messi, not only did the team have even less chance of success, commercial and sponsorship revenue would have also been catastrophically hit.
Thankfully he returned. But Messi’s relationship with Argentina was complicated. Jorge Valdano, a World Cup winner turned columnist, opined during the 2016 Copa America: “Messi does not play (for Argentina) to achieve glory but to be forgiven. If Argentina wins he will seem more patriotic to us.” For what, though, did Messi need atonement? For leaving Argentina as a boy? Messi’s father, Jorge, claimed his son “would have stayed at Newell’s (Old Boys)” in the family’s hometown of Rosario “if they had paid” for his hormone deficiency treatment. The 300 pesos he got from the club was never enough and pride stopped him from going back and asking for more. It was humiliating.
Newell’s prioritised the development of Billy Rodas instead, a decision briefly vindicated when, at 16, he became the youngest ever player to score on their debut for the club and won the Under-17 Sudamericano with Argentina. Messi, meanwhile, moved to Barcelona. This was a time of financial crisis in Argentina. The government announced £649m in spending cuts, hollowing out the welfare state that perhaps could have helped the Messis get their son the care he needed. Argentina then defaulted on its external debts, the economy contracted by 20 per cent and unemployment hit 23 per cent. Around a quarter of a million people left Argentina in the space of two and a half years looking for work and a measure of stability for their families. Messi was part of that exodus.
He remained Rosarino to his core, even at Barcelona’s La Masia academy. Messi never lost his accent. He settled down with his childhood sweetheart Antonela Roccuzzo and returned home in the off-season. But in time and amid the frustration of Argentina’s “endless nightmare” on the pitch, Messi was depicted as a “foreigner” or the “Catalan Argentine”.
Spain even tried to persuade him to switch allegiances. “There was an attempt to do that at the time but he decided to stick with the country of his birth,” World Cup-winning coach Vicente del Bosque revealed. “He remained steadfast.” Messi could have played for Italy too, considering his great-great-grandfather Angelo hailed from Recanati, near Ancona on the Adriatic coast. But Messi only ever wished to play for Argentina. He didn’t do it when it suited him like Di Stefano (Spain) and the great Omar Sivori (Italy), who played for other countries when they stopped representing Argentina (and FIFA didn’t crack down on country-swapping). He was all-in. But to some people even that was still not enough.
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On the one hand, never playing for a club in Argentina could have been to Messi’s benefit. Argentina was his club. On the other, it felt like Messi belonged to football rather than any particular place. His legend was initiated in Barcelona and it was there that he transcended. At the World Cup in Qatar, fans from Saudi Arabia and other countries wore their nation’s colours with Messi’s name and number on the back. Marquinhos, his teammate at PSG, said: “I think the thing about these players is that Messi is not Argentinian, Cristiano is not Portuguese… they go beyond that. They are a privilege for football. For people who love this sport, the tournaments, the competition, they are a treasure. They don’t belong to their countries.”
Rooted in Argentina, Messi was raised as a footballer, at least from the age of 11, elsewhere. Contemporaries of Messi’s such as Sergio Aguero (19) and Carlos Tevez (20) left their homeland young but not before leaving a mark in club football in Argentina. It bonded them with their fellow countrymen and women and made them more relatable just as Gabriel Batistuta, a fellow Rosarino whose goalscoring record with Argentina was later broken by Messi, became Batigol only upon leaving Newell’s for Boca Juniors where he conquered the Portenos, as the people of Buenos Aires are known. Messi, bizarre as it sounds, still had all that to prove.
When he attended Juan Roman Riquelme’s farewell game at the Bombonera last month, the fans sang: “Messi, Messi Messi, Messi, you’ll have to forgive us at Boca, (Juan) Roman is the greatest.” Before kick-off at his testimonial, Riquelme addressed his adoring public and expressed his appreciation for a touched Messi. “Let’s see if I can carry on,” he said amid all the chants of his name. “I was a lucky kid as I got to play with (Diego) Maradona and, as with all Argentines, he was the greatest player I ever saw. But then I got older and I was lucky enough to play alongside someone unbelievably good. I don’t know if he’s greater than Maradona. I don’t know if he’s less great than Maradona. But I know they’re the two greatest players I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s wonderful to have him here today.”
The Xeneizes, as Boca fans are known, then bowed to Messi. The tribute by Riquelme summed up what his red-bearded teammate has reckoned with these past two decades. Notice the sweet diplomatic tact Riquelme adopts, his unwillingness to proclaim either one the greatest and how big a compliment the ambiguity of his answer is to Messi. By not declaring for his esteemed, smiling guest, Riquelme acknowledged that doing so would have still been blasphemous to most Argentines. Maradona remains a god-like figure and as Valdano says: “It is almost impossible to fight a religious icon” regardless of the liturgy about a second coming.
As if the weight of expectation was not already great enough in delivering Argentina the success they had been lacking for so long, Messi also endured the burden of emulation. Every kid of any talent in his generation was quickly anointed the new or next Maradona, and it crushed many of them. Messi also grew up with his myth. The first time his father Jorge took him to watch Newell’s Old Boys was on October 10, 1993. Messi was a few months shy of his seventh birthday. Maradona was playing for Newell’s alongside Messi’s Inter Miami coach Tata Martino. He was back in Argentina for the first time in a decade and in need of love and game time ahead of the 1994 World Cup in the USA.
Messi was at El Coloso del Parque, as Newell’s ground was called before it was renamed in honour of Marcelo Bielsa, and saw Maradona score his only goal for the club against Emelec; a mazy dribble on his left foot and improbable top-corner finish with his right. As if Messi didn’t already have a big enough contemporary rival in Cristiano Ronaldo, he was pitted against the past too. The parallels started early. Messi was 19 when he ran from the inside his own half for Barcelona against Getafe and produced a carbon copy of Maradona’s most famous goal against England at the 1986 World Cup.
By matching him step for step, following Messi, for some, became about how closely he followed Maradona. Where Messi stood out tended to be where he was found inadequate. He was not from the wrong side of the tracks, the no-go zones, the places of poverty like Villa Fiorito where Maradona was raised as a pibe, the street-wise urchin whose tricks humiliated the rich and gave joy to the poor. Messi was instead at the finishing school of La Masia over in Europe receiving expensive treatment and the best training. It made him less relatable and explains why, for a time, another of Messi’s contemporaries, Carlitos Tevez, a kid from a tough crime-ridden neighbourhood, Fuerte Apache, better represented the Barras Bravas, or hardcore fans, that followed the national team.
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Maradona gave the downtrodden a voice wherever he went, particularly in Naples, where he is also deified, whereas Messi was taciturn and said comparatively little. One of the few political statements was in defence not of Argentina, but the Catalan language. “Messi is a poster, Maradona is a flag,” the Argentine writer Hugo Asch argued. The social-political dimension to Maradona, the rebel leader and redeemer, elevated him. He was more than Argentine football. He was Argentina, its unstable genius. He restored pride and avenged Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands War. What was Messi’s cause? And how could he live up to that? Is it any wonder there are YouTube compilations of Messi puking his guts out on the pitch?
The pressure was immense even if he was largely oblivious to it, insulated by Barcelona, come the time of his first World Cup in 2006. “I was very young,” he told Argentine daily sports newspaper Ole. “I enjoyed it and at the same time had the innocence and the anger that comes with wanting to play more, of wanting more.” Messi made his World Cup debut in the second group game against Serbia and Montenegro in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. He came on for Maxi Rodriguez, another Rosarino and Newell’s Old Boy who recently invited him to his farewell game. In 15 minutes, Messi set up Hernan Crespo and, at 18 years 11 months and 11 days, became the youngest player to score in the history of Argentina’s participation in the tournament.
His glittering cameo in a 6-0 win did not change the thinking of Jose Pekerman, the former footballer turned taxi driver turned coach. Messi came on as their round-of-16 tie against Mexico went to extra time but Pekerman is remembered for not turning to him in the quarter-final against Germany. His team were 1-0 up when he decided to bring on Julio Cruz for Hernan Crespo in the belief that his aerial ability would help Argentina defend Germany’s set pieces. But Germany scored, the game went to extra time and Argentina succumbed on penalties. It set the tone for the future. In the eyes of fans everywhere, Argentina could only win if Messi played. It was all on him. He was their only hope and his role in Argentina winning gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, playing Angel Di Maria through for the clinching goal in the final against Nigeria, served as confirmation.
But the dysfunction at the heart of Argentine football and the Argentine Football Federation threw one spanner after the other in the works. Messi has had nine coaches in his time with La Seleccion. By contrast, Germany, the team that regularly broke Argentine hearts in Messi’s international career, were led by one man — Jogi Low — for 15 years. Argentina instead appointed Maradona to do as a coach what he did as a player. But apart from a famous knee slide in the rain at the Monumental after a Martin Palermo goal secured qualification for the 2010 World Cup, the Hand of God gave Argentina no divine right to victory. Germany made them look mortal in South Africa, sending Messi packing in the quarter-finals with the baggage of another painful (4-0) defeat.
His struggles with the national team were confounding when set against the backdrop of his success at club level. Messi was the star in a Barcelona team widely considered the greatest of all time. He’d already won the Champions League and Ballon d’Or twice. The mesmeric, perfectly-coached collective brought the best out of him, unlike Argentina, where he was often a pale imitation of himself, unable to rise above and overcome the shortcomings of his manager and his teammates in the way Maradona once did. Even when Messi reached the World Cup final in Brazil in 2014, he did not score a single knock-out stage goal. He still collected the player of the tournament award but it was scant consolation as Germany, once again, caused him misery. If only Gonzalo Higuain, one-on-one with Manuel Neuer, had taken his gilt-edged chance at the Maracana, maybe things would have been different.
Despite the disappointment, Messi tried to draw on the positives. “It was an unforgettable experience,” he said. “One that I enjoyed a lot and where it became clearer than ever to me that the most important thing is to have a strong and united group of players. In the long run, it takes you places.” Messi rediscovered that alchemy ahead of the 2021 Copa America, the tournament where everything changed. “I feel there are many similarities between this group and the 2014 one,” he explained. “The group and its mental strength is important.”
It was the beginning of the Scaloneta, the name given to the era of Lionel Scaloni, a former teammate of Messi’s and member of Sampaoli’s coaching staff. Argentina went 36 games unbeaten and, along the way, lifted the Copa America for the first time since 1993. The triumph laid to rest some of the stereotypes about Messi. “He does not have the character to be a leader,” Maradona once said. No one could draw the same conclusion after witnessing the speech Messi gave before the final against Brazil. “He lost his mind,” Di Maria said. Messi has always been portrayed as a quiet man of few words, one who leads by example rather than through his charisma. But not that day. We saw another side to Messi.
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“We already know what Argentina-Brazil means,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to thank you all. Thank you for the last 45 days. I told you on my birthday this is a fantastic group, I’ve enjoyed the last 45 days, eating together, being in the hotel and on the pitch without our families. Forty-five days without seeing our families, guys! Dibu (Emiliano Martinez, the goalkeeper) even had a daughter and couldn’t see her or hold her in his arms and all for what? For this moment because we have an objective and we’re so close to achieving it and guess what?
“The best thing of all is it depends on us. That’s why we’re going to go out there and lift the cup, we’re going to take it back to Argentina and enjoy it with our friends and family, with the Argentine people who have always got behind us. I’m going to finish by saying one last thing. In life there is no such thing as coincidence. This tournament was supposed to be played in Argentina (it was moved because of Covid-19). God wanted it to be played in Brazil so we can win it at the Maracana, lads, and that makes it all the sweeter for us. So go out there, believe in yourselves, stay calm and we’ll bring it home. VAMOS.”
Di Maria’s winning goal was almost an exact replica of the one Messi set up for him to win Olympic gold in China. The wait for a major trophy was over and all of a sudden more silverware followed. Argentina outplayed Italy at Wembley to win the Finalissima, a reintroduced one-off game between the champions of Europe and South America and, as Argentina prepared for Qatar, the fans came up with a song that captured the mood. ‘Muchachos’ was the soundtrack of the World Cup.
“I was born in Argentina, land of Diego and Lionel/of the boys from the Falklands that I’ll never forget/I can’t explain it because you won’t understand/the finals that we’ve lost, I’ve grieved them for so long/But it’s all over now because at the Maracana/We won the final against the Brazilians/Guys, now we can dream again, I want to win the third (World Cup), I want to be a world champion.”
The lyrics expressed the renewed hope and belief of a football nation, all of which was quickly extinguished when Argentina lost their opening game to Saudi Arabia in one of the biggest upsets in World Cup history. Asked how everyone was feeling in the locker room afterwards, Messi didn’t shy away from the truth. “Muertos”. The players felt dead inside. The ghosts of past failures returned to haunt them. Saudi fans taunted Argentina asking: “Where’s Messi?” The Brazilians in Qatar sang: “Messi tchau” to the music of Bella Ciao. Bye-bye, Messi. Time was running out for him. At 35, this was billed as his last World Cup and it was all going wrong.
Argentina had lost key players to injury on the eve of the tournament, principally Giovani Lo Celso and Nico Gonzalez. But no one expected them to lose their long unbeaten record to Saudi. All of a sudden the pressure was back on. Messi already felt it in the lead-up to the World Cup. He spoke about “the anxiety within my family and the country as a whole. Particularly my wife Antonela and son Thiago who watches all the national team games and knows all the possible match-ups, the opponents. ‘When are we going?’ he asks. ‘When’s the first game? When’s the second game?’ He’s nervous and the truth is that it puts terrible pressure on me.”
You could see it. Argentina lost the first game in 1990 and still reached the final. But the tension was overwhelming. “At times, anxiety consumed us,” Messi admitted. “It made us play fast and give the ball away.”
On the sidelines against Mexico, Scaloni’s assistant Pablo Aimar, the player Messi idolised as a boy, broke down and cried when Messi scored to keep Argentina’s hopes alive. “This is what happens when someone really loves this game,” Aimar said. “We’d gone almost a week with no sleep because of how badly we started. It was relief.” Managing emotions seemed harder for Argentina than coping with their opponents. “We should have a little more common sense,” Scaloni remarked. “It’s a football game. I do not share the feeling that this is more than a football game. It’s hard to get people to understand that the sun will still rise tomorrow (if Argentina lose).”
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The jeopardy Argentina still found themselves in is hard to overstate. Scaloni was being questioned like never before and it wasn’t difficult to imagine Marcelo Gallardo replacing him in the event of elimination. The team was in a state of evolution at a time of tremendous stress as players like Cristian Romero, Leandro Paredes and Lautaro Martinez struggled for form. Qualification for the knock-out stages was still in doubt when Wojciech Szczesny saved Messi’s penalty in the final group game against Poland. Fresh faces like Enzo Fernandez, Alexis Mac Allister and Julian Alvarez were needed in order to get the team over the line and Argentina started to enjoy themselves only after clearing Australia in the round of 16, a better-than-expected match-up after Denmark surprisingly crashed out in the Aussies’ group.
“We really worked hard not to be in awe of him,” Australia’s coach Graham Arnold said of Messi. But it was the 1,000th game of Messi’s career and he put on a show. “It’s hard to keep the best player that’s ever played the game out of the game,” Milos Degenek, the Aussie defender, explained. “He needs half a metre. You give him half a metre and he scores a goal.” It was Messi’s first goal in the knock-out stages of the World Cup. As if to make a point, he scored in all of Argentina’s remaining games and began bending the tournament to his will. There were some incredible moments, from the pass for Nahuel Molina’s opening goal in the quarter-final against the Netherlands, which improbably took out six Dutch players in one fell swoop, to the punch-drunk dribbling of Josko Gvardiol, arguably the defender of the tournament, against Croatia in the semis.
Valdano claimed to see a “Maradonian” streak in Messi. More than the goals and the assists, Messi’s performances had an edge to them. The silent conductor against Australia became a snarling, goading street fighter against the Netherlands. When he scored his penalty to put Argentina 2-0 up, he cupped his ears — a gesture now known back home as the Topo Gigio celebration for its likeness to a big-eared cartoon mouse — and signalled to Louis Van Gaal he’d heard all the little digs the veteran coach had made at him on the eve of the game and in the past. Messi confronted him and his assistant Edgar Davids in extra time when tempers flared, and then memorably shouted: “What are you looking at, bobo?” to Wout Weghorst after Argentina prevailed on penalties with a ballsy final spot-kick from Lautaro.
That was the craziest match until the final against reigning champions France, an epic 3-3, in which Kylian Mbappe became the first player to score a final hat-trick since Geoff Hurst did so for England in 1966 but still lost. Di Maria once again left his mark on a final, Messi scored a brace, Emi Martinez stopped France’s penalties and Gonzalo Montiel decided the shoot-out as he would in the Europa League final for Sevilla six months later. When Montiel’s penalty went in, Messi sunk to his knees and was embraced by Paredes, who shouted: “We’re champions of the world.”
The struggle was over. “It’s what I was looking for my entire career,” Messi said. “On top of that it was what I was missing and what everyone wants because winning the World Cup is the maximum for any player. I was lucky enough to win everything else and this was like closure. To be able to finish by winning the World Cup and say I won everything is mad.”
Whatever your nationality, wherever you were, it just felt right. A fairytale ending, too good to be true by a player too good to be true. When Messi and Argentina lost the 2015 Copa America final, Chile’s coach Sampaoli asked him why he had refused the player of the tournament award. Messi told Sampaoli he didn’t want to win for himself but for Argentina. In the end, he delivered and that in turn led Messi to deliverance.
“You touched every single Argentinian, I mean what I say,” the journalist Sofi Martinez said to a smiling Messi in a flash interview immediately after the final. “There isn’t a kid in Argentina who doesn’t have your shirt. An original one, fake one, made up or the imaginary one. This is a thank you for a moment of huge happiness you brought to many people. I hope it stays with you in your heart because it’s more important than a World Cup and you already have that, so thank you, captain. You marked everyone’s life and for that to me, is more important than the World Cup. No one will take that away from you.”
As Messi passed the gold trophy on his way to the stage, he caressed and kissed its head like a doting father. The baby he’d always wanted. When the Emir of Qatar placed a bisht, the prestigious cloak, on Messi’s shoulders, some of his teammates felt a sense of deja vu. At the 2021 Copa America, a group of them passed the time playing the card game truco. They challenged each other to guess the next tarot card out of the deck. If everyone guessed right, it would be taken as an omen that they were going to win the competition. Papu Gomez picked the Ace of Wands and the Ace of Wands duly appeared. Nicolas Otamendi selected the Seven of Spades and the Seven of Spades came out of the pack. Then it was Messi’s turn. He went for the Five of Cups and the Five of Cups emerged.
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Oxymoronically, hindsight has lent that moment a mystical and premonition-like quality totally in keeping with the magical realism of Argentina football. The Five of Cups shows a man in a cloak with three trophies toppled over — the finals lost between 2014 and 2016 — and two standing; the Copa America and the World Cup. The prophecy came true to the delight and delirium of the millions of people on the streets of Buenos Aires.
Who would have thought? The man who once retired from international football in the US now moves there a world champion.
