Leo Messi says goodbye to the Argentina National Team. “I leave empty,” says his farewell note. “He leaves us full,” I say on behalf of all of us who love football. He says goodbye to the most suffering, beloved, and glorious jersey for him. He leaves my favorite refuge, the place where I could enjoy him without guilt. As a Madrid fan, it was an uncomfortable love. But it was impossible not to admire his enormous talent. Impossible, for me, not to feel proud by delegation and pure Argentineness. Impossible not to love him.
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Talent that amazed from day one, but that became monumental in the end, when he showed us, in slow motion, what the essence of football is. Walking. Wandering the field as if it belonged to him, managing the timing like a clock and the ball like a sacred object.
In this last World Cup, I found a simile that I think did him justice. An Argentine magician, René Lavand, one-handed and virtuous with cards, performed a trick with one hand and said: “It can’t be done slower.” But then, he repeated the trick over and over, only indeed slower each time.
Also Messi, in every World Cup, developed his art more slowly and there was no way to discover his trick. In an increasingly physical, more tactical, more overanalyzed football, no one was able to deactivate his surgeon’s precision.
He dispensed with ornamentation in favor of concreteness. He did not overact. His was not an artistic beauty, but a practical one. The effective beauty that current football demands. I have been doing the same for 20 years: every time a play ends, I say to myself: “This is how you play.”
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Since football is not just anything and Messi was the ultimate expression of this game for almost the entire 21st century, we are forced to ask ourselves a question: How do you say goodbye to a king who abdicates? A king by popular choice. Retiring the jersey, recalling his insane statistics, watching his main feats on loop. It all seems little to me for a player who for more than 20 years was part of the social landscape of our lives, elevating football but, above all, impacting our emotions. Each one in their own way enjoyed or suffered Messi and today, taking stock, sifting through it again and again, only what matters remains: how happy he made us.
There will be no better tribute than to remember his career in the national team, not without bitterness. To the point that exactly 10 years ago, he retired accepting that he was not born to win anything relevant with Argentina. He couldn’t become a champion and the runner-up finishes, one in a World Cup, two in Copa América, were blamed mostly on him. He even carried the accusation of being “cold-hearted.” Turning that burden around shows his two loves: the one he feels for Argentina and the one he feels for football. He came back, his heart warmed up, and he won two Copa Américas and a World Cup. He settled his debts one by one, although honestly, he never owed me anything. But he took it so seriously that, if he competed with Diego (a kind of football Jesus Christ for the Argentine religion), he ended up honoring that competition too by beating England in the last curve and with all the epic.
He leaves with just glory. He takes with him an era and we will be left with the feeling of having seen something unrepeatable. Someone who turned the extraordinary into routine. Maybe it’s time to understand the dimension of that privilege. Football will go on, as it always does. Argentina will find another number ten and we will find other idols. Meanwhile, Leo will look seated at the table of those who fit on the fingers of one hand and every time he is named, I will think: “This is how it was played.”
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