“No te vayas Lio” (Lio, don’t go). That phrase has been trending on social media since the early hours of Monday, when Argentina captain Lionel Messi announced, in tears, that he had quit international football after defeat in the Copa América final to Chile.
Messi missed a penalty in the shootout and the result extended Argentina’s title drought to 23 years.
Messi made his World Cup debut some 10 years ago. He was hailed as the great hope for a country that had already won two World Cups, a country in which football is central to notions of national identity.
“Football has resonance everywhere,” Ezequiel Fernandez Moores, Argentina’s leading sports columnist, says. “But more here in Argentina, because it really is the one area in which we are a recognised force in the world.”
Lending credence to the idea that everything can be explored through football, a divided Argentina entered into endless discussions throughout the day.
Messi grew up in Barcelona after moving to Spain when he was young to pursue his football career; he became an icon for a club that has marked a new standard in excellence; and he has had to endure whistling and booing when playing on home soil. The weight of the Argentina strip has clearly become a burden, in spite of the many who adore him.
Football generally is seen in as many different ways as there are people watching it. But at the 2006 World Cup, when Argentina were knocked out by Germany in a match in which then manager José Pekerman chose to leave a young Messi on the bench, the world shouted: “Messi should have played.”
We now know about Messi’s almost pathological stage fright, his vomiting on the eve of big games, but it’s a guess whether these were factors Pekerman took into account at the time.
Since then, Argentinian football has tried to create circumstances in which Messi can thrive. Managers are appointed and people say Messi wanted them. Players are dropped and people say Messi asked for it. But we have no evidence for these theories; we simply attribute power to Messi, and then reproach him when he doesn’t live up to our expectations.
It’s impossible to know what exactly Messi was thinking when he quit, but there is a feeling that this was not a knee-jerk reaction but a careful decision that had been brewing for some time. At 29, now a father, and having become a household name worldwide with all that this entails – fiscal scrutiny, public interpretations of his every move, accountability on a scale unimaginable to non-celebrities – it’s possible Messi was planning to retire even if Argentina had won. That he really has had enough.
After last year’s Copa final, which Argentina also lost to Chile, there was a telling quote from the then Chile manager Jorge Sampaoli. After the game, Sampaoli asked Messi why he had refused the ‘best player’ award. Messi said he didn’t want to win for himself. He wanted to win for Argentina.
Many Argentinians need Messi to bring a trophy home so they can feel like champions. But many others are simply satisfied with the joy he brings with his game alone. We don’t know how much he still enjoys playing. But one thing is clear. This marriage between country and ball, this ongoing unsettled debt which runs both ways – Messi is not enjoying it at all.
