Lionel Messi is 39 years old, playing in a scoreless World Cup Final in extra time at MetLife Stadium, and Adidas has already named his boots “El Último Tango” — The Last Tango — which is about as subtle as a flare gun fired inside a library.
After Argentina beat England 2-1 in the semifinal, Messi told reporters he’s “really very tired, just like my other friends,” per Yahoo Sports. That’s not athlete-speak for needing a nap. That is a man telling you something real, in the middle of a tournament where he has scored 8 goals and added 4 assists and is about to make his 34th World Cup appearance — an all-time record for any player, men’s or women’s. He said it plainly, the way tired people do when they have stopped pretending.
This is the guy who has played in six World Cups. Six. He has 21 goals across 33 games. He passed Miroslav Klose’s men’s scoring record this tournament, putting away his 17th and 18th World Cup goals against Austria. The records are almost beside the point now. The number that gets me is the touches: first half tonight, Messi had 15. Lamine Yamal had 26. The man who used to define every game by his sheer gravitational pull on the ball is operating in the margins now, conserving, choosing his moments. He is still dangerous. But the architecture of the game has shifted around him.
And then there is the Yamal thing, which is going to live in my head rent-free for years. In 2007, a 20-year-old Messi — already one of the best players alive — bathed a five-month-old baby in a little blue plastic tub for an FC Barcelona Foundation charity calendar benefiting UNICEF. That baby was Lamine Yamal. Tonight, the 19-year-old Spain winger is on the opposite side of this World Cup Final, running at Argentina’s backline, racking up touches, being the young unstoppable force that Messi used to be. Messi was already generational when this kid was learning to hold his own head up. The photograph might be the most heartbreaking sports image that has ever existed, and it predates the sport moment it now describes by nineteen years.
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My cousin was texting me from the MetLife parking lot before kickoff, telling me how loud it was, how many Argentina kits he could see, how the whole place felt different from a regular game. He’s been to Giants games, Jets games, a WrestleMania. He said this was different. I believe him. My dad’s only text tonight was “watching messi.” Three words. No punctuation. He’s 66 years old and does not send texts without periods. He knew.
The complicating part is that Messi has not actually said goodbye. His Inter Miami contract runs through 2028. When pressed on his international future, he said “day by day.” So there is a version of this where we are back here in four years, doing this again, everyone treating a 43-year-old’s every touch like it might be the last one. That possibility is somehow both a relief and a source of additional dread, because it means the ending keeps getting deferred, the grief kept in suspension, the goodbye never quite arriving. Which might be the most Messi thing of all.
But the boots say El Último Tango. The man himself said he is very tired. He has 15 touches in a World Cup Final and the kid he once held in a bathtub has 26. Twenty years of watching the best player alive, and it has come down to extra time at MetLife, scoreless, everything still possible and everything already over.
Watch him. Seriously. Put the phone down and watch him.
