Messi earns the ending greatness seldom gets

Sports is supposed to be about winning, but if you watch enough of it, you learn something crueller: most of the greatest careers in history don’t actually get to choose how they finish.

Someone or something else decides it for them – a manager, a federation, a body that has gradually stopped responding to the brain attached to it, or, in Diego Maradona’s case, a drug test.

The great athletes rage and claw and sometimes humiliate themselves trying to postpone the inevitable. Very, very few get to walk out of the building on their own two feet, head held high, exactly when they meant to.

Tuesday night in Buenos Aires, Lionel Messi did exactly that. And if you line him up against the rest of football’s pantheon, you start to realise how genuinely rare that is.

The rogues’ gallery of bad goodbyes

Start with Ferenc Puskas, captain of Hungary’s Mighty Magyars, the team that should have won the 1954 World Cup but somehow didn’t, losing the final to West Germany in what the football world still calls the Miracle of Bern.

Two years later, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising, and Puskas, on tour in Spain with Real Madrid, could never go back home. He never played for Hungary again. No farewell, just history slamming the door on an entire golden generation.

Or take Johan Cruyff, the man who basically invented modern football as an idea and then, in 1978, walked away from the Netherlands squad before a World Cup his country were among the favourites to win, reportedly after an armed break-in at his family’s home in Barcelona left him too shaken to leave his children behind.

The Dutch reached the final anyway, and lost, and Cruyff’s international story simply trailed off into oblivion.

Franz Beckenbauer managed things with slightly more grace, bowing out of the West Germany set-up in the late 1970s with a World Cup already in his trophy cabinet from 1974, before heading off to make Pele’s acquaintance at New York Cosmos in the glitzy fairground of the old NASL.

Respectable, if unspectacular – the closest thing on this list to a man simply closing a laptop at the end of a long shift.

Then there is Maradona, who gave Argentina the 1986 World Cup almost entirely by himself and should, by rights, have been permitted to leave the international stage as a deity.

Instead, 1994 happened: a positive test for ephedrine doping during the World Cup in the United States, a humiliating expulsion from the tournament, and an ending that had nothing to do with football at all.

Genius, undone by its own chaos, sent home in disgrace rather than triumph.

Zinedine Zidane, so imperious for so long, somehow contrived to close out his France career with his forehead buried in Marco Materazzi’s chest in the 2006 World Cup final, a red card in the 110th minute of the biggest match on earth, watching from the tunnel as his teammates lost the shootout without him.

It remains one of the strangest, most operatic final acts in football history, brilliant until the precise moment it stopped being brilliant.

Ronaldo Nazario went out with a bittersweet mix of record and regret. His last official match for Brazil was the 2006 World Cup quarterfinal, a 1-0 defeat to France on July 1, just days after he had scored against Ghana to become the tournament’s all-time leading scorer with 15 goals. That was the end of the road in competitive terms.

The send-off had to wait until June 7, 2011, when Brazil staged a farewell friendly against Romania at the Pacaembu in Sao Paulo. He wore the number 9 one last time and played the first half, and Brazil won 1-0 through Fred.

He had three chances to score and missed all of them, and joked afterwards that fate had a sense of irony. He finished with 62 goals in 98 appearances, two World Cups and a place among the greatest strikers the game has seen.

And Neymar, whose goodbye carried a different kind of ache. Years of knee trouble and a calf strain just weeks before the tournament meant that many people, fans and pundits alike, doubted he should even be in Brazil’s squad.

He had not pulled on the shirt since the ACL tear in October 2023, and Ancelotti’s decision to pick him raised plenty of eyebrows. One man never doubted it. Messi, who shared a dressing room with him at Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain and counts him among his dearest friends, said in May that he “can’t be objective” about Neymar and wanted him at the World Cup whatever his condition.

Neymar got there, but he watched most of the tournament from the bench, never started a match. He played just 15 minutes against Scotland before coming on against Norway with Brazil already losing.

He scored a late penalty, his 80th goal for his country, extending his record as Brazil’s all-time leading scorer to three clear of Pele, and then slumped to the turf at MetLife in tears, admitting simply, “I tried, I tried.”

It was an honest, human exit from a man who gave Brazil a Confederations Cup and an Olympic gold. But it came after their earliest World Cup exit since 1990, and it is a reminder that even enormous talent guarantees nothing about how you get to leave. His old friend, three months later, got the farewell that he never got.

Pele, almost alone

Of all of them, really only one man comes close to what Messi managed on Tuesday, and that is Pele. In 1970, at the absolute peak of his powers, Pele led Brazil to a third World Cup in Mexico, playing arguably the finest football of his career in the process, and then simply never needed to play international football again.

No scandal, no tears of humiliation, no door slammed on him by politics or circumstance. He finished as the best player on the planet, on the biggest stage there is, having just won the thing everyone plays the game to win.

That is the only real precedent for what Messi was given this week. Everyone else on that list above learned, one way or another, that the sport does not owe you a clean exit just because you were brilliant enough to deserve one.

The night nobody wanted to end

Which brings us to the Monumental, on a cool Buenos Aires spring evening, where more than 85,000 people gathered hours before kick-off just to be near the thing that was about to happen.

Messi cried on the team bus on the way there. He cried during the anthem.

Fans ran alongside the vehicle trying to catch a last glimpse of him in an Argentina shirt. He had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires that same afternoon, and laughed when someone in the crowd shouted “Doctor!” at him on arrival.

A giant replica of his number 10 shirt had been hung in Rosario, the city where this whole improbable story began. Another went up in the capital. It was, by any measure, completely over the top. It was also, somehow, entirely appropriate.

The match itself was stopped in the tenth minute, an organised pause so the entire stadium, his own teammates and the opposing players from Benin could simply stand and applaud him. He hadn’t expected it, and it clearly caught him somewhere he wasn’t braced for.

Lionel Scaloni, the manager who built an entire footballing architecture designed to let Messi do what only Messi can do, wept on the touchline. So did Messi’s three sons, who had walked out onto the pitch hand in hand with their father before kick-off.

And then, because football occasionally remembers its manners, Messi did what he has done for his entire career: he delivered. A perfect corner teed up Nicolas Otamendi, 38 years old himself, for his own small farewell moment.

A pass sent Nico Paz through for a brilliant finish. And finally, in the second half, Messi converted a penalty for his 126th and final international goal, closing out a 3-0 win with the minimum of fuss required of him, as if the football itself was simply a formality attached to the real event happening in the stands.

Afterwards, somewhat out of character for a man built on economy of words, he couldn’t stop talking.

“I’m talking more than ever, I don’t want to leave the pitch,” he said, laughing at himself near the centre circle, before turning serious and addressing the supporters directly: “Now I’m going to be on this side, supporting these boys and all those who are to come.”

It is worth remembering, amid all this adoration, that Argentina did not always feel this way about him. For years, many years, a meaningful portion of the country booed him, doubted him, accused him of being too cold, too European, not enough like Maradona, a genius who somehow felt insufficiently Argentine because his brilliance never seemed to cost him anything.

He lost finals in 2007, 2014, 2015 and 2016, retired once in 2016 after the last of those defeats, and was talked back into it by a national campaign that essentially begged him to reconsider. It took a World Cup win in 2022, finally, to silence the doubters completely and for good.

At 39, Messi carried an ageing Argentina side almost entirely on his back through the 2026 World Cup. He scored eight goals, extended his record run to nine successive World Cup games with a goal, and set up the winner in the semifinal against England.

He also became the first player to start three World Cup finals. Then he reached the final and found Spain waiting, led by Lamine Yamal, the teenager he had bathed in a plastic tub as a five-month-old baby for a UNICEF charity calendar shoot back in 2007.

It felt close to prophecy: the baby he once held grew up to be the player who beat him to the one prize he still wanted. Spain won 1-0, and afterwards Yamal walked over to Messi as he sat on the grass, a moment that looked a lot like a torch being passed.

There’s a line from Guy Ritchie’s Snatch that fits the shape of that journey better than it has any right to: Messi, by the time he reached Tuesday night, was “as bent as the Soviet sickle, and as hard as the hammer that crosses it,” endlessly bent by criticism and heartbreak over two decades, yet somehow never actually broken by any of it.

Meanwhile, in Portugal

Which makes the other half of this story almost unbearably awkward to tell. While Messi was being sent off into the sunset with drone shows and honorary doctorates, Cristiano Ronaldo was in the middle of walking out of Portugal’s training camp over being left on the bench against Norway, a saga that somehow produced a two-thousand-word statement in which he compared himself to Pele and Maradona.

He noted that he “gives the most autographs, takes the most selfies and shows the most affection to the fans,” and demanded to be punished for leaving camp but not too severely, on account of being team captain. It is, even by Ronaldo’s own extraordinary standards, a lot.

Ronaldo has been here before, and another Guy Ritchie film, 2019’s The Gentlemen, has a line that fits his story uncomfortably well: “That which does not kill you, usually succeeds in a second attempt.”

The first attempt came in 2022, when he was benched in Qatar and somehow fought his way back into the starting line-up.

The second came this summer, and it was far less kind. At the 2026 World Cup he scored three goals, two of them in a 5-0 win over Uzbekistan and the other a penalty against Croatia, but against Spain in the last 16 he managed just 19 touches in 90 minutes, none of them after the 80th minute, as Portugal went out to a late goal.

A smarter ending was available right there. Instead, at 41, he chased one more chapter.

That is the real problem, and it has little to do with Portugal manager Jorge Jesus. Ronaldo has overstayed his welcome, not because anyone stopped respecting what he has done, but because he has refused to accept that the role has changed.

He was withdrawn against Wales, left unused against Norway, and walked straight down the tunnel without acknowledging the travelling fans.

Days later he left the camp altogether and released a 2,000-word statement, apologising for walking out but insisting he still wanted to play. Meanwhile Portugal beat Denmark 4-2 and Norway 2-1 without him, and have looked more balanced doing it.

The mood at home has shifted with it. Much of the Portuguese public now feels he has turned his back on the national team, a verdict splashed across the front of O Jogo, and most of the country’s newspapers and commentators have called his behaviour selfish.

A loyal core still defends him fiercely online, but even his most devoted supporters around the world are finding it harder to explain this one away.

The goals, the records and the 234 caps once ended every argument, and they no longer seem to cover a man walking out on his own team.

The love affair between Ronaldo and Portugal is fraying, not because anyone stopped admiring the career, but because he would not let it end gracefully.

The two men have always been judged against each other through goals and Ballons d’Or, through transfers and trophies, through a rivalry so total it reshaped an entire generation’s idea of what a footballer could be.

But this particular comparison isn’t really about who scored more or who won what. It’s about something much simpler and much harder to manufacture: knowing when the story is actually over, and having the grace, or the luck, or both, to let it end that way.

Pele managed it, on top of the world in Mexico in 1970. Puskas never got the chance, swallowed by tanks and politics. Cruyff disappeared mid-sentence. Maradona was dragged off in disgrace. Zidane went out with his head down, literally. Ronaldo Nazario got his farewell, but only years after his last official match, and without the goal he wanted.

Neymar said his goodbye in tears at MetLife, a substitute in a lost tournament instead of the star of a farewell. And Ronaldo, Cristiano this time, appears determined to keep fighting a battle that Father Time won a long time ago.

Messi, for all the years Argentina spent unsure of him, finally got the one thing almost none of these men were given: a goodbye that matched the career.

Only Pele, half a century earlier, got anything close. Everyone else, in one way or another, had the ending taken out of their hands.

Messi, for once in football’s long and unforgiving history, got to keep his.