Messi is in Argentina’s squad two weeks after retiring, and he will play one of the three friendlies
Lionel Scaloni’s list for the international window includes a player who announced his retirement from Argentina at the end of August. The AFA has set aside the Benin friendly on 6 October at the Monumental as Messi’s farewell.
Sep 16, 2026
Two weeks after Lionel Messi told Argentina he was finished playing for them, the AFA published a squad list on Tuesday with his name on it. This is not a reversal. It is a ceremony with a date attached, and the date is 6 October.
One match out of three
Lionel Scaloni’s list covers an international window of three friendlies. Argentina play Bolivia at the Mario Alberto Kempes Stadium in Córdoba on 30 September, then move to the Monumental in Buenos Aires for Burkina Faso on 3 October and Benin on 6 October. Messi’s involvement has been confirmed for the Benin game only.
AFA president Claudio Tapia has said that match is intended as the farewell, the one where the crowd at the Monumental gets to say goodbye to him in person rather than through a phone screen. Players from the 2022 World Cup-winning squad are being invited to the ceremony with their families.
Whether Messi plays ninety minutes, half an hour, or walks out for the anthems and a lap of the pitch has not been spelled out. Neither has what happens to the retirement afterwards, for the simple reason that nothing happens to it. He is still retired. Argentina have just built him an exit that does not end with an Instagram post.
Why the farewell had to be arranged separately
Messi’s last match for Argentina was the World Cup final in North America on 19 July, which Spain won 1-0 in extra time. That is a difficult way for a twenty-one-year international career to stop, and it stopped a long way from home. The retirement letter came at the end of August, written in his own hand and posted to his accounts, and his father Jorge had died earlier that month.
So there was no last home game. The AFA had already ordered matches under its control to stop in the tenth minute for a minute of applause, which tells you how badly Argentine football wanted a send-off it had not been given. A friendly at the Monumental is the closest thing available.
What he is walking away from
Messi made his Argentina debut in a friendly against Hungary in August 2005. He finished with 207 caps and 125 goals, both national records, and 68 assists, which is also a record. Only Cristiano Ronaldo has scored more goals in men’s international football.
He played six World Cups and reached three finals, losing to Germany in 2014 and Spain in 2026 and winning the one in between, in Qatar in 2022, which was Argentina’s first world title in 36 years. The two Copa América wins in 2021 and 2024 sit either side of it. He is 39, and he has eight Ballon d’Or awards, more than anyone.
The rest of the list
Scaloni’s squad is not built entirely around the send-off. Cristian Romero, Julián Álvarez, Enzo Fernández and Lautaro Martínez are all in it, and so are four players who did not go to the World Cup: Franco Mastantuono, Agustín Giay, Román Vega and Matías Soulé. Two of those three fixtures are ordinary work, and Scaloni still has a squad to rebuild around a shirt nobody is going to fill.
The Benin match is the one that will sell out. Messi’s last appearance in an Argentina shirt was at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, in a final his side lost, in front of a crowd that was not his. Just under three months later the plan is for him to walk out at the Monumental instead. That is the whole point of it.