Messi's Argentina Farewell Closes a Career That Rewarded Patience
As Lionel Messi plays his last match for Argentina against Benin, the numbers and history behind his international career show how close his story once came to ending very differently.
Lionel Messi plays his final match for Argentina on Tuesday, a friendly against Benin, after being invited back for a farewell appearance following his retirement from international football in the wake of Argentina's defeat in the 2026 World Cup final, according to The Analyst (Opta).
The occasion carries no sense of obligation. By the time he walks off for the last time, Messi will have won 208 caps and scored 125 goals for Argentina, more than any other player in the nation's history, as The Analyst reports.
That total, and the trophies that came with it, make the first sixteen years of his international career look almost unrecognisable by comparison.
How close the story came to ending in 2016
Messi had already announced his international retirement once before, after Argentina lost the 2016 Copa América Centenario final to Chile, their fourth defeat in a major final in three years.
"This is tough and a difficult time," he said at the time, as quoted by The Analyst. "The first thing that comes to my mind and that I have thought is that the end has come for me and our team... I tried many times [to win something with Argentina] and I leave without being able to obtain it."
He reversed the decision roughly six weeks later, after a national campaign urged him to stay, per The Analyst's reporting. Had that campaign failed, the Messi international story ends with four lost finals and no World Cup.
What followed instead was a decade in which Argentina went from the chaos of the 2018 World Cup, where reports of a player mutiny emerged after a 3-0 group-stage loss to Croatia and the team were eliminated by France in the round of 16, to becoming champions of the world.
Messi stepped away from the squad again after that tournament, during a period in which Argentina sacked Jorge Sampaoli and promoted his assistant, Lionel Scaloni, in a move The Analyst describes as widely unpopular at the time.
Diego Maradona's assessment of the appointment, delivered to Clarín, was blunt: "He's a great guy, but he can't even direct traffic... How can we give the Argentine national team to him? Are we all crazy?"
Why Scaloni's system was built around one principle
Scaloni and assistant Pablo Aimar did enough to convince Messi that his absence from the squad need not be permanent, a decision that looks, in hindsight, like the pivot point of the entire era.
Scaloni has since become the only Argentina coach to win a World Cup and multiple Copa América titles, and he is the coach under whom Messi has earned the most caps of his career, 79 in total, according to The Analyst.
The tactical logic behind that success is specific rather than incidental. Scaloni's teams have been organised to protect and amplify Messi's influence in the final third without asking him to contribute defensively in the way a conventional forward or winger would.
That is a deliberate trade-off, not a compromise forced upon the coach. The rest of the Argentina team absorb the defensive and transitional workload that a more balanced system would otherwise distribute more evenly, freeing Messi to operate almost entirely in possession and in the attacking half.
The images from the 2026 World Cup of Argentina's squad walking out to warm up, with Messi positioned as though leading the group, were cited by The Analyst as evidence the rest of the squad bought into that arrangement rather than resenting it.
It is a model that only works if the supporting cast treats the extra defensive responsibility as a shared duty rather than a grievance, and Argentina's results over this period suggest that collective buy-in held.
What the World Cup numbers say about his legacy
The trophies alone do not capture the scale of what changed. Argentina won consecutive Copa América titles either side of their 2022 World Cup triumph in Qatar, their first world title since 1986, and reached the final again at this year's tournament, as The Analyst details.
Messi has played in more men's World Cup matches than anyone else, 34, and shares the record for most editions played, six. His 33 World Cup goal involvements stand as a tournament record, with 22 of them coming across the two most recent editions alone, according to The Analyst's figures.
Those numbers measure output and longevity rather than style, but taken together they describe a player whose influence on the biggest stage intensified rather than faded in the final stretch of his career, at an age when most forwards are already in decline.
Tuesday's match against Benin closes a international career that very nearly ended in 2016 with none of it. Argentina's modern era, built by Scaloni around maximising Messi rather than managing him, delivered the trophies that eluded both player and country for the best part of two decades.
Sources
- The Analyst (Opta): Lionel Messi’s Argentina Farewell Match Brings Curtain Down on a Golden Era that Almost Wasn’t
- Planet Football: The one-off GOAT kit Lionel Messi will wear for his final Argentina appearance
- Football Italia: One Last Night at the Monumental: Messi’s Argentina Farewell vs. Benin With Serie A Stars In Attendance