What triggered Messi’s Argentina retirement? A letter written on 21st July and his father’s death

Lionel Messi did not retire from Argentina on impulse. He wrote the goodbye first, then sat with it.

In the handwritten note posted on Instagram on Monday, the 39-year-old said he had put the words down on 21 July, two days after Argentina’s 1-0 extra-time loss to Spain in the 2026 World Cup final in East Rutherford. He did not publish them then. He published them after his father died.

The last line of the letter is the one that explains the timing: “I wrote these words on July 21st, two days after the final. Today, after what happened to my dad, I’m even more convinced than before.”

That is the trigger. Not a single shock, but a decision already forming after the final, locked in by grief.

The decision was made before the funeral

Lionel Messi’s note is careful on this point. He does not say his father dying created the retirement. He says it confirmed it.

The football reasons are in the body of the letter. After 20 years in the shirt, he writes that he has “emptied” himself and has “nothing more to give.” He points to the young players coming through. He calls the choice a wound that “hurts deep in my soul,” then adds that he understands the moment has arrived.

Those sentences were already on paper in July. Jorge Messi was still alive then, though seriously ill and unable to travel to the tournament his son later said he had begged him to play.

The sequence matters. Messi flew back to Rosario after the final to be with his father. Jorge Messi passed away on 8 August, aged 68, after a long illness. Four days later, on 12 August, Messi published a separate open letter to him. In that tribute, he admitted he did not know how to go on, and that he now had “serious doubts” about how much longer he would keep playing football at all. Monday’s announcement is the international half of that doubt, made formal.

Why the father’s death carried so much weight

Jorge Messi was not only a parent in the stands. He was Lionel’s agent from the time the teenager left Newell’s Old Boys for Barcelona, the man who negotiated the career and sat inside it. Messi’s August letter to him made that plain: father, friend, representative; the person who had been there “from the very beginning.”

He also wrote that his father had pushed him to play this last World Cup, and that he had tried to drag Argentina as far as the final so Jorge might still be well enough to watch. They reached the final. Jorge could not be there. Argentina did not win it.

That is the private context sitting under Monday’s public footnote. The sporting chapter was already closing. The man who had opened it was gone. Messi says that combination left him more convinced, not less.

What he is walking away from

This is not a quiet fade. Messi leaves as Argentina’s most-capped player and all-time leading scorer, with 207 appearances and 125 goals. He played six World Cups, appeared in three finals, won the tournament in Qatar in 2022, lifted Copa América in 2021 and 2024, and won the 2022 Finalissima.

The last image on the shirt is the 2026 final: Spain winning with a Ferran Torres extra-time goal, Messi at 39 still carrying a side that had no right, on age alone, to be that deep in the tournament.

He is not announcing a full stop on football. His Inter Miami contract runs into 2028. The retirement is specific: the national team, the shirt he says he loved, loves, and will always love, now from the other side of the fence.

“Now I become one of you,” he wrote, “cheering and supporting from the outside.”