From Devil to Deity: How Lionel Messi Rewrote His Argentina Story
It’s both depressing and oddly fitting that New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, that giant air conditioner plonked in the middle of a sprawling parking lot, should end the international career of the greatest player in the history of the sport—not once, but twice.
Lionel Messi’s final competitive appearance for Argentina, the last he would ever play before his father passed away, was a defeat to Spain in this summer’s World Cup final. A decade earlier, that same potato field in East Rutherford was the scene of Messi’s first international retirement.
“For me, the national team is over,” Argentina’s beleaguered No. 10 meekly revealed in the bowels of the MetLife, hunched over and clutching a wash bag after missing a penalty in a shootout defeat which handed Chile the 2016 Copa América. “I wanted this title more than any other but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Two finals, two defeats and two international retirements in the same soulless pit of concrete. However, the universal love-in which has greeted Messi’s decision to definitively step away from the blue and white stripes this time around is remarkably different to the vast array of emotions he inspired at his first retirement.
Why Argentina Hated Messi
The editor of the popular publication Diario El Sol, Federico Brusotti, once wrote: “There is something more Argentine than dulce de leche. It is our ability to turn our athletes into heroes or villains.”
While it can be hard to imagine given his current godly status, Messi has actually spent more time as Argentina’s villain than its hero.
By his own description, the nation’s all-time leading appearance maker and top scorer was “blamed, cursed at, lied about with no apparent remorse” for more than a decade while on international duty. There were reasons for this hate, just no justifiable ones.
Not Diego Maradona
Borocotó, the revered editor of the seminal magazine El Gráfico, came up with what the physical embodiment of the Argentine game should look like in 1928:
“A pibe [urchin] with a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb; with intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes and a sparkling gaze that seem to hint at a picaresque laugh that does not quite manage to form on his mouth, full of small teeth that might be worn down through eating yesterday’s bread.”
Almost half a century later, Diego Maradona would debut for Argentina, turning that description into flesh and giving rise to an obsession which would last for almost another 50 years. The 1986 World Cup winner was not far from the status of a deity, with some of his disciples even setting up a Church of Maradona.
This suffocating level of acclaim was the consequence of Maradona’s play and his personality. He was the pibe who rose from poverty to the pinnacle of soccer (and thereby life), quite literally freeing himself from a pile of human excrement in the slums of his childhood.
Messi is a different character entirely. Also short, slight and left footed, but there was no raw sewage in the lower middle class home of his youth. Not that any average Argentinian would know much about Messi’s upbringing or anything he did off the pitch given his chronic reluctance to utter a single word—in public or private.
One of Messi’s school teachers recalled a classmate speaking on behalf of little Leo, such was his fear of being heard. When he joined Barcelona’s youth team, Cesc Fàbregas “thought he was mute.” Juan Sebastián Verón remembered a petrified Messi pacing around their shared room before he had to give his first team talk as Argentina captain: “The kid didn’t know what to do.”
The contrasts with his predecessor were sharp. Messi got criticized for mistakenly walking past a child’s outstretched hand while lost in contemplation after a match. Maradona spent his postgame fiddling with a prosthetic dummy penis to evade doping tests. Messi stopped talking to journalists in protest, Maradona opened fire on them with an air rifle.
The issue for Messi, particularly during the early years of his Argentina career, was that these differences with the country’s greatest idol were impossible to avoid while Maradona was his actual manager for the national team.
The great player was no grand tactician, cycling haphazardly through more than 80 call-ups as Argentina unconvincingly qualified for the 2010 World Cup. Messi went seven months without an international goal at one point in the buildup to a tournament he failed to score at entirely. After a humiliating quarterfinal exit to Germany, the narrative which had been forming was clearly set: Blame Messi.
“He isn’t ready to shoulder the burden of the team; he isn’t cut out to take on the role of playmaker,” Martín Palermo, Messi’s former international teammate, scoffed after the tournament. “Messi doesn’t have Maradona’s mentality.”
At the 2011 Copa América on home soil, Messi went through another major tournament without a goal and was booed by the Santa Fé crowd. “He leaves Argentina truly hurt every time people speak ill of him,” Messi’s mother Celia Cuccitini fretted. “Why is it always him? He suffers a great deal; he leaves feeling terrible, and it takes him a long time to bounce back.”
Ironically, had Messi shown Argentina his suffering, it may have stopped.
Not Argentinian Enough
