Lionel Messi Retires From Argentina at 39, Closing a 21-Year International Career
Lionel Messi announced on Monday that he is retiring from the Argentina national team after 21 years, saying the time had come to stop. On Weibo, where the news collided with memories of his 2008 Beijing Olympics appearance, fans and teammates filled the evening with thank-you letters.
Lionel Messi has played his last game for Argentina. The 39-year-old announced his international retirement on social media Monday, ending a 21-year national-team career in which he won the 2022 World Cup, two Copa América titles and an Olympic gold medal — and in which the recent World Cup final turned out, without anyone planning it, to be his farewell match. According to Baidu's coverage of the announcement, Messi said his father's death was what confirmed a decision he had already been circling.
His statement, posted alongside handwritten letters, was characteristically direct about the cost. "In the time since the final I have thought it over and over," he wrote. "It is a decision that pains me, and still aches, but I understand the moment has come. I swear to you I always gave everything for this shirt — not only in these years of winning everything, but before that too — only to bring you joy, to let you feel proud to be Argentine through football." A post carrying the announcement was liked more than 11,000 times within hours.
The tributes from his squad began immediately. Midfielder Enzo Fernández posted a long letter recalling that, as a child, he used to calculate the age gap between himself and Messi to work out whether they could ever share a pitch. "Luckily, you came back, and life turned out better than the child I was could have imagined," he wrote — not only did they play together, they won the World Cup together. Defender Lisandro Martínez, commenting under Messi's own post, called the news "an enormous sadness" and told his captain, "You are the best athlete in history, because in football there is simply no comparison."
The story ranked among the top items on Baidu's hot-search board with a heat score above 7.2 million, and Chinese fans claimed their own piece of the goodbye. Sports outlet Zhibo8 ran tribute posters reading "Leo, thank you — you are football, an irreplaceable youth," and a widely shared recap reminded readers that Messi's trophy haul included gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where he played as a 21-year-old. For a generation of Chinese fans who first watched him in Beijing, his retirement lands less as sports news than as a milestone in their own coming of age.
What remains is club football and time with family. "There is not much time left now, and one journey after another is drawing to a close," Messi wrote. The blue-and-white No. 10 will not be worn again by anyone else for a while.