The Passion of Lionel Messi
Andres Vaamonde on the GOAT and Argentine culture
Even if most of what you know about the World Cup is that it’s currently happening, you might also know that Lionel Messi is involved. The diminutive Argentine is everywhere. At this point, Messi is the undisputed soccer GOAT — or, in fútbol nomenclature, D10S, a portmanteau of his jersey number (10 is often awarded to a team’s most skillful playmaker) and the Spanish word for God. In his native Argentina, though, Messi has not always been beloved as a D10S. In fact, he was once a subject of significant dispute, and even acrimony. In a move emblematic of modern Argentine culture, Messi was deified only after he had become a conduit for national self-pity.
Unlike many legendary Argentine football stars of yore, Messi did not rise through the ranks of the nation’s club system. His family struggled to pay for the expensive medical treatments required to treat his case of growth hormone deficiency, and his local youth club, Newell’s Old Boys, did not follow through on its initial promise to cover the total cost. In 2000, when Messi was thirteen, FC Barcelona swooped in with a contract written on a napkin and an offer to pay for his care. The rest is history. Messi would spend the next twenty years of his life in Barcelona, winning a litany of titles and awards and scoring practically infinite goals. (In 2021, Messi had a brief, odd stint with Paris Saint-Germain before he shipped out stateside in 2023 to make an eye-popping salary playing for Inter Miami.)
Messi wasn’t the only Argentine to jump ship at the turn of the 21st century. The Argentine economy shrank by nearly twenty percent between 1998 and 2002. Unemployment spiked and civil unrest blossomed: the country had five presidents within just two weeks at the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. An estimated 250,000 Argentines left between 2000 and 2004, and the period left yet another psychic scar on a nation that had been struggling for generations to reclaim the prosperity it had enjoyed in the late nineteenth century, when Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. Since the crisis at the start of the new millennium, this golden age has seemed further away than ever for many Argentines. As a couple of balding men said to me in Queens minutes after the Argentine national team squeaked out its victory over Cabo Verde: “Siempre sufriendo, che?” Always suffering.
This sense of national beleaguerment found its way into Argentine football culture. A country used to winning soon found itself mired in a title drought. As the shaggy-haired teenage Messi rose to prominence, many hoped he’d be the one to end it, but the national team — known as the Albiceleste — continued to disappoint and a narrative took hold in Argentina that he just couldn’t win. The problem was that he didn’t understand the country; he didn’t play like an Argentine. Messi’s legendary precursor Diego Maradona was born to an indigenous father and an Italian mother in the dirt-road slums of Buenos Aires. He was brash and authentic, operating at full tilt on and off the field — chest out, curly mane flying. Messi, meanwhile, was demure, even dull-seeming; an ostensibly privileged white kid from the Argentine equivalent of the Midwest. He had a European style, walking around the pitch, patiently waiting for his turn to strike. Where Maradona earned love by expressing passion, Messi seemed incapable of articulating his emotions. At a charity soccer match in 2016, Maradona was caught on a hot mic telling the Brazilian legend Pelé that Messi “is a good person, but he has no personality.”
That same year, after a third sequential heartbreaking defeat in a major tournament final, Messi gave up. Speaking to reporters at MetLife stadium in New Jersey (which will also be the site of this year’s World Cup final on Sunday), he announced his retirement from the Argentine national team. It was a come-to-D10S moment for the Argentine football world. The city of Buenos Aires repurposed transit signs on main roads and in subway stations to mimic a popular social media hashtag: “Lio, no te vayas.” Lio, don’t go. Then-President Mauricio Macri publicly encouraged Messi to reverse course. Rallies were organized to collectively mourn the loss and beg for his return. One banner unfurled at the airport upon Messi’s return read: “Messi, si jugarías en el cielo, moriría por verte.” Translation: Messi, if you were to play in heaven, I would die just to see you. Messi himself became a kind of martyr: a legend felled by the weight of unreasonable expectation and early disappointment. Argentines blamed themselves. As one promising teenage soccer player wailed on Facebook: “How are we going to convince [Messi] if we are disastrous?”
Since Messi returned to the national squad in the runup to the 2018 World Cup, his teammates have sought to prove that they’d do anything to help the star achieve redemption. And they’ve delivered, winning the Copa América in 2021 and 2024 and the World Cup in 2022. The triumphant Argentine national team of the 2020s essentially consists of Messi — an exceptionally talented but, in his late thirties, aged messiah — and a hoard of unselfish ushers and pugnacious security guards intent on atoning for the great national sin of having initially driven him away. That teenaged soccer player who criticized a “disastrous” Argentina, for example? He’d grow up to be Enzo Fernández, the midfielder who scored the game-winning goal against Egypt in the Round of 16. Veteran defender Nicolás Otamendi (who is only one year Messi’s junior) sports a photorealistic tattoo on his abdomen that features not one but two different depictions of Messi. The hero of the 2022 World Cup, goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez, put it bluntly: “I want to give him life, I want to die for him.” Nowadays, the question of Messi’s argentinidad no longer arises. He’s delivered at the highest level for his nation — and even begun to publicly express his emotions. After Argentina’s last-minute (and controversial) comeback against Egypt last week, Messi let loose a torrent of tears.
Andres Vaamonde is an Argentine-American writer and fiction assistant at The Drift.
