DON'T be sad that it's over. Smile that it happened.
These two sentences have generally been repeated time and again when something comes to an end. Job. Relationship. Streak. Career. On Sunday afternoon, long after Lionel Messi had departed the cavernous New York/ New Jersey Stadium, it was impossible not to feel sadness but also smile at the same time. One of the greatest athletes had likely played his last meaningful match in the sport he had come to own over the last two decades. It has been nothing but a privilege to watch him for more than 20 years, right from wunderkind to prince to king.
Inter Miami's next game in the Eastern Conference is on Wednesday night (local time), but from a broader perspective, this may well be it. For the vast majority of people who fell in love because of his Barcelona or, more recently, Argentina exploits, there may be no more Messi moments. No more watching that little shake of the hip, the clipped cross to the back-stick from the right half-space, no more bullying defenders, no more first-time left-foot finishes from just outside the box… no more Messi (he will likely continue playing with the franchise considering he has a contract till 2028).
If his month with the national team in Qatar was the perfect closure after more than a decade of heartache, his final odyssey in the US over the last 40 days was the icing on the cake: a kind of farewell tour where he played out all of his greatest hits. Every day, you woke up not knowing if today would be that final day. Every night, you went back to sleep knowing full well that there would be one more batch of 90 minutes either in front of your eyes or on TV screens or on an OTT platform. On Sunday night, as the world slept, Messi fans silently wept.
They had just seen their superhero in his final World Cup match.
A ringside view to Da Vinci's last creation. Watching Shakespeare pen his final sentence. Listening to Beethoven's concluding symphony.
There will of course be disappointment that Messi couldn't conjure magic one last time. A final against this Spain side was always going to be a tough challenge, and it came to pass. La Roja, who picked up their second World Cup, denied him time and space, and for once in this tournament, his age showed. Barring a couple of moments in extra-time, he was shackled as the opponents cut off the supply lines and denied him and his colleagues oxygen. But pull the curtains back; this wasn't like that other final he lost in 2014.
He had transcended the sport so long ago it made little difference that he ended up on the losing side. For a man who has played the game for over 95000 competitive minutes — if you start a tape featuring all the matches involving Messi from the time he made his debut, it would finish in the third week of September — another 90 minutes wasn't in any way going to define him. Sure, having a second star would have been nice, but he didn't need one more trophy to tell his story (his story already includes one World Cup, over 1100 matches, almost a 1000 goals and over 100 individual and team titles).
Yet, his story is more than all of that. It's part of his legend, but the 39-year-old mattered to many because, at the very core, he was an emotion. A player whose dribbles and feints on Sunday nights had the capacity to beat the Monday blues. In England, a journalist and his mother reconnected because of their shared love of watching Messi. In Catalonia, he will always be on bedroom walls. In Rosario, his birthplace, Lionel or Lionela were two of the most popular baby names in the month after Qatar. In Kolkata, a 70ft Messi statue was commissioned and installed in December 2025 by the local government (since been taken down). There are Messi murals in Dhaka, over 16500 kms away from Argentina's capital. For a period of time, Messi even started helping in other ways; as part of viral pick-up lines on dating apps. "Can I carry you so I can have a 10 on my back like Messi?" was one. "My two GOATS, Messi and you," was another.
He awakened something in people irrespective of how often or how seldom they watched the sport. Like Roger Federer, he made it easy to fall in love with the sport. "If you like football," the former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger had once remarked, "you like watching Messi."
In the end, past the titles, goals, records and milestones, that's the only thing that matters.
The capacity to make people fall in love.