Prarthana Hazarika
Shillong, Aug 31: The shirt will remain. The number will remain. The memories will remain.
But Lionel Messi will no longer wear the Argentina No.10.
At 39, Messi has brought the curtain down on his international career, closing one of the most extraordinary chapters in football history. For more than two decades, Argentina’s hopes, frustrations, celebrations and heartbreaks were inseparably linked to the little man wearing No.10.
Now, he has said goodbye.
Messi’s final appearance for Argentina came in the 2026 FIFA World Cup final against Spain, where the defending champions finished runners-up after a 1-0 defeat. It was not the ending Argentina had dreamed of for its greatest footballer. But perhaps, by then, the ending mattered less than everything that had come before it.
The numbers tell only part of the story.
Messi leaves Argentina as the country’s most-capped player and record goalscorer, with 207 appearances and 125 goals. But his greatest achievement was not simply becoming Argentina’s record holder. It was surviving the weight of expectation long enough to finally give his country what it had been waiting for.
For years, the criticism followed him.
The 2014 World Cup final defeat to Germany. The Copa América final disappointments. The endless comparisons. The question of whether Messi could ever win the biggest prize in an Argentina shirt.
In 2016, after another painful final defeat, he walked away from international football.
But Messi returned.
And that decision changed Argentine football forever.
The 2021 Copa América finally brought him his first major international trophy. Then came Qatar.
The 2022 World Cup was the moment when the story was rewritten. Messi lifted football’s most coveted trophy, completing the one achievement that had followed him throughout his career.
Another Copa América followed in 2024.
The player who had once been accused of falling short on the international stage had become a world champion and the undisputed leader of a golden generation.
That is why his farewell hurts.
For millions who grew up watching Messi, Argentina was never quite Argentina without him. His left foot created moments that seemed to belong to another world — the acceleration, the dribbles through impossible spaces, the passes nobody else saw and the calmness in front of goal.
There will be another No.10 one day.
There will be another captain.
There will be another generation.
But there will never be another Messi.
His international journey ends without another World Cup medal, but it ends with something far more important: redemption, respect and immortality.
The Argentina shirt will move on.
Football will move on.
Messi will continue his club career with Inter Miami.
But for those who watched him grow from a prodigious young talent into Argentina’s greatest footballer, this is more than a retirement.
It is the end of an era.
The No.10 has bowed out.
The legend remains.
