Photo by Voltmetro (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

The last walk at the Monumental: Messi says goodbye to Argentina

Some of the supporters filling the Estadio Monumental on Tuesday evening will remember the teenager from Rosario who first pulled on the blue-and-white shirt in 2005. Others have never known an Argentina team without him.

They will all be there for the same reason. At six o'clock local time, Lionel Messi plays for Argentina for the last time.

The opponent is Benin. The match is a friendly. None of that matters much. This is a farewell, and Argentina have built the whole evening around it.

A goodbye he chose

Messi announced his international retirement in late August. He is 39 and still playing club football with Inter Miami, so this is not a body giving out. It is a decision, made on his own terms, about when to stop.

The Argentine Football Association has answered with a night of tribute and a commemorative shirt for the occasion. Lionel Scaloni, who coached him through the most successful years of his international career, has said the timing is deliberate.

A tribute, he argued, should happen while it still means everything, before "the magic might not be the same".

Scaloni has also spoken about what Messi meant to him personally. Coaching him, he said, was the greatest experience of his life in football, and there will never be another player like him.

The ground that knows him best

There is a reason this match is at the Monumental. Of all the stadiums in Argentina, it is where Messi has scored most often for his country: 19 times.

He arrives with 125 international goals from 207 appearances, both national records. Benin will be cap number 208.

The weight he carried, and finally put down

For years, the story of Messi and Argentina was a story about what was missing. He won everything at club level while his country lost final after final. The criticism at home was sometimes harsh, and it followed him for most of a decade.

Then it all changed. Copa América in 2021. The World Cup in Qatar in 2022. Another Copa América in 2024. Add the Olympic gold from Beijing in 2008, and the player once accused of saving his best for Barcelona leaves having won every major honour the national team can win.

That is what Tuesday really celebrates. Not just the goals, but the turn: from the player Argentina doubted to the one who gave them everything they had waited for.

What the night will look like

Do not expect 90 minutes. A 39-year-old in a farewell friendly is more likely to be taken off late, at a moment chosen so the whole stadium can rise for him. Expect his teammates to look for him at every free kick and every chance in the box, hoping for a 126th goal in the place he has scored the most.

And then, at some point on Tuesday night, the most important player in Argentina's history will walk off a football pitch in the national shirt for the final time.

For everyone at the Monumental, whichever Messi they grew up with, that is the moment they came for.

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