Messi played 207 times for Argentina, and now every match there stops at ten minutes

Argentine football is going to stop for a minute, over and over, for as long as the fixture list runs. The AFA confirmed on September 2 that every match under its control will pause at the ten-minute mark of the first half so the ground can applaud Lionel Messi.

What the AFA has ordered

The instruction is unusually broad. It covers every category of men’s and women’s football the association runs, and it does not stop at eleven-a-side: futsal and beach soccer are included too. Grounds with big screens will play a video of Messi’s Argentina career before kick-off, and then, ten minutes in, play stops and everyone claps.

Nobody at the AFA needed to explain the choice of the tenth minute. Messi has worn the number 10 for Argentina since 2008, when Diego Maradona took the 18 off him and handed him the shirt he had worn himself. Eighteen years later the association is using the number as a clock.

A retirement written in July and published in August

Messi announced on August 31 that he was finished with the national team. He did it on Instagram, in a handwritten note, and the note itself was older than the post. He wrote it on July 21, two days after Argentina lost the World Cup final 1-0 to Spain in extra time on July 19.

Then he sat on it. His father Jorge died on August 8, and the news stayed private through that. When it finally went out, he described it as “a decision that hurt” and said he understood that “the time has come”. He also wrote that there are young players coming through who deserve the place, which is the part that reads like a man who had made his peace with it weeks earlier.

Twenty-one years, and the two records nobody is catching

Messi debuted for Argentina in 2005 and leaves at 39 with 207 caps and 125 goals. Both are national records, and neither looks like being beaten any time soon. For most of that run the argument about him was that the trophies had not come, which stopped being true in 2021 when Argentina won the Copa America. The 2022 World Cup followed, their third and their first in 36 years, and then a second Copa America in 2024.

It is a strange career to summarise, because the last five years rewrote the first fifteen. A player who spent a decade being told he could not do it for his country finished with three senior international titles and the World Cup he was supposed to have missed.

He has not stopped playing

This is an international retirement and nothing more. Messi’s Inter Miami contract runs to 2028, so the club football continues in Major League Soccer, and Argentine crowds who want to see him in person will have to travel. What they will get instead is a minute at every ground in the country, week after week, which is a stranger and probably better tribute than a farewell match would have been.

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