What do you do after you have done everything?
This question has been circling Lionel Messi ever since December 18, 2022. Having finally reached the promised land by becoming a world champion with Argentina in Qatar, there remained no unconquered peaks for Messi. To use social media lingo, Messi had completed football.
More than 30 months later, Messi is still around, still buzzing with possibilities with the ball at his feet. Still racking up man of the match awards as if he were making a cup of his favourite mate drink. But Messi is no longer on a mission. His quest for footballing perfection has long ended.
Why, then, is he still playing? What is still motivating him? Which Messi story still demands another chapter?
A diminished magician
At 38, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt had both been retired for seven years. Muhammad Ali made an ill-advised comeback to boxing at the same age. Roger Federer lost a Wimbledon final from two championship points less than a month before his 38th birthday. He was never the same again. Messi, for his part, continues to be the highest-rated player (as per footballing database WhoScored) with Inter Miami in their domestic league, where the average age is 26.
For Argentina, Messi endures as the talisman, even if he is no longer the defining factor in how the Albiceleste play, an admission made by head coach Lionel Scaloni earlier this month.
Messi isn’t playing on reputation alone. But is also not at his stratospheric best, which won him the Ballon d’Or in three different decades. There have been four prime versions of the Atomic Flea, but Messi at 38 isn’t one of them.
This is evident not so much in hard numbers (he still averages roughly a goal or an assist a game), but in subtle moments on the pitch. In the way Messi can no longer glide past three defenders in the same run or cut inside from the right wing to beat the keeper at his near post. The through balls, the nutmegs, the shoulder feints are all there. But they don’t come around as often. And they don’t feel as sublime.
Argentina don’t need Messi; Messi doesn’t need Inter Miami
Like most elite footballers, Messi’s eventual retirement might come in two stages. With his international swansong likely preceding his club farewell.
In the interviews he has given since winning the World Cup, Messi has reiterated how he enjoys playing with the current Argentine side, whose core is relatively young. Having suffered under the weight of comparisons to Diego Maradona, is Messi hanging around just to play with all varieties of monkeys off his back? Then again, how long is too long?
At last summer’s Copa America, which Argentina won without getting out of second gear, Messi was peripheral. At the upcoming World Cup in North America next summer, Argentina’s chances seem brighter without Messi, as that would allow Lautaro Martinez and Julian Alvarez to operate as a front two, with Scaloni’s battery of playmakers tucked in behind. For strictly tactical reasons, Messi shouldn’t be a constant fixture in Argentina’s World Cup starting XI. But who would dare to drop him?
While Argentina may not need Messi, Inter Miami definitely do. Not just because Messi is the most gracefully ageing player in a team topped with veterans. But because, similar to Mahendra Singh Dhoni and the Chennai Super Kings, Inter Miami’s commercial value has become inextricably interlinked with Messi. “It would be nice if he played another 10 years,” Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham said recently. We hear you!
Messi’s own financial interests also align with biding his time in Miami. But is that reason enough? For Messi’s legacy would not be affected in the slightest if he woke up one weekend and decided he had had enough of beach tans, Cuban sandwiches and Luis Suarez, who looks to be running with stones strapped to his knees.
In the event that Messi does leave Miami, his club career could well be over. Unless a romantic return to his boyhood club Newell’s Old Boys (in Rosario) is how Messi bids adieu.
An anti-climactic ending
Nobody has been blunt enough to ask Messi (at least in public) what is still keeping him going. Is it the vision of collecting one more World Cup, this time from… Donald Trump? Or is it a personal promise to not retire before Cristiano Ronaldo? Ronaldo, for one, could well have made a corresponding vow to himself!
Perhaps it’s none of these. Perhaps it’s just the sheer futility that Messi knows will meet him once he hangs up his boots. Messi isn’t the sort to be screaming instructions from the touchline as a coach. Nor does it sit right for him to orchestrate footballing politics in suits. As far as commentary is concerned, Messi speaks very little in general. None of which is in English.
The closest parallel in modern sport to Messi’s situation can be found in Sachin Tendulkar. Having reached the pinnacle of his sporting odyssey in April 2011 by clinching World Cup glory on home soil, Tendulkar went on playing till November 2013. Like Messi, Tendulkar was ill-equipped for the paraphernalia of post-retirement options. No wonder then that Tendulkar’s most memorable outings in the past 12 years have involved him batting — at exhibition matches.
Messi isn’t ready for exhibitions yet. Not least because he can still put on a show when it matters. The kind that Leonard Cohen would have done in the 2010s — tainted with cracks, but still teeming with light. And maybe that is what Messi is still playing for. The urge to illuminate the field once in a while even if he has to lurk much longer in the shadows.
When Messi ultimately quits, maybe it won’t be a grand exit with another trophy in his hands. Maybe it won’t be the heartbreak of a devastating defeat. Maybe it will simply end in an anti-climax — one muscle strain too many, one free-kick that doesn’t curl quite right, or the sudden acceptance one morning that there’s someplace else he’d rather be.