An open letter to Messi: Goodbye to the football I grew up with

Dear Leo,

I should probably be embarrassed to admit this, but I'm not: for me, football has never really been about football. It's been about you.

I know how that sounds to someone who loves the game for its clubs, its rivalries, its tactics, its long and tangled history. Excessive, maybe. Irrational, definitely. But it's the truth of how I lived it.

Before I understood offside, I knew your name. Before I could've found Argentina on a map, I knew the shirt you wore. And long before I understood that childhood quietly turns into memory while you're not looking, you were already somewhere inside mine – folded into it, the way a song from a certain year gets folded into that year forever.

People sometimes ask me, "Why Argentina?" My answer has always been embarrassingly simple: because Messi plays for Argentina. And now that you have retired from international football, there is another question waiting for me: "What about Argentina after Messi?" Perhaps the answer is just as simple: because Messi played for Argentina.

You were never just a footballer I liked. You were the footballer who taught me the game, without either of us knowing that's what was happening. I watched you as a kid, back when I didn't care about formations or pressing traps or what anyone's transfer fee was. I just cared about that feeling – the one where you'd get the ball, take two touches, and something that should've been impossible would just… happen. Quietly. Like it was nothing. I didn't have words for what made you different. I just knew that when you had the ball, I stopped blinking.

Somewhere along the way you stopped being a thing I watched and became a thing I did – part of the routine, and eventually part of the memory. There are matches whose scorelines I've completely forgotten, but I could still tell you which room I was sitting in, who was next to me, what time it was. I remember the nervous energy before Argentina played. The arguments with friends who supported other teams just to annoy me. The specific ache of the losses. And underneath all of it, this stubborn, slightly irrational belief that somehow, this time, you'd do something.

But loving you also meant learning what it feels like to lose alongside someone. You taught a whole generation of us that being the best doesn't come with a guarantee. 2014 slipped away in the final. Then 2015. Then 2016 – the same heartbreak wearing a different year. Every time, it hurt a little more strangely, because you were already one of the greatest to ever play, and still people wanted to know why that wasn't enough. As if one man could carry an entire country's football history on his back and never once stumble.

Then came the moment you said you were done.

After the 2016 Copa América final, you walked away from the national team. And for those of us who'd grown up with you, it felt like losing something before we'd had the chance to say goodbye properly. But you came back. I don't think we understood, at the time, how much that mattered. You didn't come back to prove anything to the people who'd doubted you. You came back because, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, Argentina still meant something to you. That's not nothing. That's not something everyone would do.

2021 finally rewrote the ending. I remember watching you lift that trophy and thinking about every final that hadn't gone this way – feeling the relief of it, but also something quieter and heavier underneath the relief. The question was finally answered. You'd won something with Argentina.

Then Qatar happened, and by then I wasn't the kid who'd first found you anymore. I'd grown up somewhere alongside your career, without really noticing it happening. And yet during that World Cup I felt exactly the way I had as a child – nervous before kickoff, unable to sit still during the match, celebrating your goals like they'd happened to me personally, not to you. When you finally lifted the World Cup, it felt less like watching an ending and more like finally exhaling.

And then, 2026. Maybe that was the hardest one to watch, because some part of me already knew it might be the last time I'd see you in that shirt on that stage. Thirty–nine years old, and somehow it still felt normal – Messi, still there, still finding passes no one else could see, still carrying all of it. Argentina made the final again. Spain won it this time. There was no fairy tale ending waiting. Two days later, you'd already written the words that would become your goodbye. And strangely, I don't think you needed the fairy tale. You'd already given us the one we thought was impossible, back in Qatar. 2026 wasn't about finishing the story. It was just one more chance to watch you live inside it, a little longer.

You're not just leaving the national team. You're taking a piece of my childhood with you, whether you meant to or not.

I know that sounds dramatic. But I think a lot of people my age would say the same thing if they were honest. We grew up with you. We watched you go from the impossibly gifted kid to the captain who finally carried this team to the top of the world. Some of us watched you in school uniforms, half–paying–attention to homework. Later it was between university classes, or after long days at work, squeezed into whatever gap in adult life we could find. Everything else around us kept changing. You were the one constant.

And maybe nowhere was that stranger, or more real, than here in Bangladesh.

You played thousands of kilometers from us, and somehow Argentina still felt like ours. Blue and white flags went up on rooftops and rickshaws in a country that has never once played in a World Cup. People who'd never set foot in Argentina celebrated its wins like their own team had won. Friends who agreed on nothing else could talk about you for hours without running out of things to say. Match nights turned into memories on their own, no trophy required. In some houses, cheering for Argentina became something close to a family tradition, passed down without anyone deciding to pass it down.

But for a lot of us, it never really started with the country.

It started with you.

You were the bridge.

You made us care about a place we'd never seen, learn the names of players we'd otherwise never have known, and stay up until four in the morning for a match that meant nothing to our own daily lives except everything. That's not a small thing for one person to do to millions of strangers.

Your international career didn't end with the perfect script. Maybe it was never going to. It didn't need to. You'd already won the World Cup, two Copa Américas, and given this team more than two decades of your life. You leave as Argentina's most–capped player and its all–time top scorer, and even those numbers don't really capture it. Numbers rarely do.

You spent years being asked to deliver the perfect ending, over and over, like it was owed to us.

And at some point, I think you quietly decided you didn't owe anyone that.

I think that's actually kind of beautiful.

For once, there's no demand for one more tournament, one more final, one more miracle out of you. You've given enough. You wore the armband long enough. You gave us more nights than we had any real right to expect from one person.

So go, Leo.

Let the next kid take the field without having to play in your shadow. Let someone else wear the number. Let someone else step up for the free kick. Let someone else carry this for a while.

We'll manage.

Football keeps going. Argentina keeps going. There'll be another great player eventually, another great run, another generation of kids somewhere finding their own hero the way I found you.

But there's only one first Messi. There's only one you, at the age when I didn't know any better than to believe in magic.

And that's the version of you I'll keep. Not just the one who lifted the trophy, or the one who scored the goals that made stadiums forget how to breathe. I'll remember the Messi I watched as a kid, back when football felt simple and the world felt smaller, when just watching you touch the ball was enough to make me believe something impossible was about to happen.

You were there while I grew up.

That's why this doesn't feel like saying goodbye to a footballer. It feels like saying goodbye to a piece of myself.

So when someone asks me now, "Why Argentina?" – I'll still have an answer.

Because Messi played for Argentina.

Maybe that's how I'll tell this story for the rest of my life.

I didn't just watch you.

I grew up watching you.

Thank you, Leo – for the football, and for the memories a whole generation of us will be carrying long after the whistle's gone quiet for good.

You were my football.

And you'll always be part of my childhood.