BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- Argentina is girding itself for the once-unimaginable prospect of a national team without soccer great Lionel Messi.
On Tuesday, the 39-year-old Messi is set to bid farewell to international soccer after 21 years, 125 goals, two Copa América titles and a World Cup championship. What would otherwise be an unremarkable friendly match against the West African nation of Benin has become the moment that this soccer-crazed country has long dreaded.
"It feels like an era is ending, knowing he won't play for the national team anymore," said Valentino Ruso, 17, who was heading to a friend's house in Buenos Aires to watch the game. "I'm sad. I think everyone is upset today. He will be missed."
Argentines have had an intense, often unforgiving relationship with the shy boy who left his hometown of Rosario at 13 for the youth academy of Spanish club Barcelona. As he grew into a global icon of near-mythical stature, his compatriots adored and abused him, doubted his commitment and accused him of indifference to his own country.
But as he prepares to say goodbye to the national team, his devotion to Argentina is no longer in question. Nor is Argentina's devotion to its most famous export whose triumphs have served as reminders of national greatness through years of political and economic instability.
"Argentines often say, 'Thank God I was born at a time when I could experience the miracle of watching Messi play,'" said Andrés Rabinovich, a University of Chicago scholar who has researched soccer's role in Argentine culture. "It's hard living in Argentina. Soccer is often one of the few things that offer you some respite, some joy."
For years, Argentines had debated when and how Messi should leave the international stage. His Aug. 31 announcement that he'd be retiring from the national team, weeks after Argentina's loss to Spain in the World Cup final, prompted an outpouring of gratitude and grief even as he'll continue to light up Major League Soccer with Inter Miami.
"I don't know if there has ever been a love story between a player and a nation as great as the one you built," his teammate Rodrigo De Paul wrote on Instagram.
The Argentine soccer federation turned Tuesday's game -- Messi's 208th -- into a national farewell billed as "the last tango." More than 85,000 tickets to Buenos Aires' largest stadium sold out in 90 minutes, later fetching over $2,500 on resale sites. Players from Argentina's 1978, 1986 and 2022 World Cup-winning squads, along with their families, joined the tribute.
Accompanied by his three sons, Messi emerged onto the field to fireworks, his eyes glistening. Chants of "ME-SSI! ME-SSI!" rolled through the stands as fans bowed toward him. A giant replica of his No. 10 Argentina jersey was unfurled across the pitch, bearing a simple message: "Gracias."
During the 2000s and 2010s, Messi amassed trophies with his club and won diehard fans from Barcelona to Bangladesh. Yet a major championship for his own country eluded him.
Where the world saw a supernatural talent, some at home saw an outsider who had never played professionally in Argentina and seemed to buckle under the weight of their expectations. Argentine crowds chanted "Diego, Diego," invoking Diego Maradona, the larger-than-life hero of Argentina's 1986 World Cup victory -- and reminding Messi of the standard he had yet to meet. Messi's quiet reserve, so at odds with Maradona's defiant swagger, fueled doubts about his patriotism.
After Argentina lost a third consecutive final in 2016, Messi briefly quit the national team.
"There's some resentment by the people that stay in Argentina for those who leave, this sense of, 'They think they're better than us,'" said Rabinovich, adding that he identifies with Messi as a fellow teenage migrant, having moved to Canada during Argentina's 2001 economic crisis, around the time Messi left for Europe. "The old-school Argentines would say, 'Diego is the Argentine. Messi is soft, a little Spanish boy.'"
The turning point came in 2021, when Argentina beat Brazil to win the Copa América, South America's championship, for the first time in 28 years. Messi collapsed to the turf as his teammates, delirious, ran to hug him. The player long accused of feeling too little could not stop sobbing.
"Winning clearly disarmed his critics. That's how soccer works in Argentina," said Diego Murzi, a sports sociologist at Conicet, Argentina's national scientific research council. "Criticism of things off the field goes hand in hand with defeats on it."
The World Cup victory the following year in Qatar sealed his place as a national hero. Messi had delivered the one prize that had eluded him, and millions of Argentines poured into the streets in collective ecstasy, his name in their chants and his No. 10 on their backs.
"I'll never forget it. I'd never experienced anything like that, being out there with everyone, celebrating together," said Antonia Correa, 70, a kiosk owner recalling that day as she waited for a bus in Buenos Aires on Tuesday. "We saw that he wasn't just an extraordinary player, but an excellent human being."
In recent weeks, newspapers have hummed with nostalgic tributes and murals celebrating Messi have sprung up across the country. La Nación, a leading Argentine daily newspaper, released "Immortal," a documentary chronicling his final World Cup run, and published a 196-page special edition devoted to his career. The iconic Obelisk in downtown Buenos Aires on Tuesday glowed sky blue and white, the colors of the national flag. And in Patagonia, a 26-meter (85-foot), 70-ton statue of Messi kneeling with the World Cup trophy has towered over passing motorists since June.
Across Argentina, fans who grew up watching Messi as their parents watched Maradona now carry him on their skin, in tattoos of him kissing the World Cup trophy. It was easy to believe the world's greatest player would always be one of their own. Now even Messi's No. 10 shirt has no designated heir, with coach Lionel Scaloni saying the decision would wait until after his final match.
"I don't think we'll have somebody like him again, somebody with that sort of enduring power," said Pablo Brescia, a University of South Florida professor who writes about Argentine culture and soccer. "Like Maradona, he'll be unique -- a figure that can't be repeated."
Messi's contract with Inter Miami runs through the 2028 season. But the charged ritual of watching him carry Argentina's hopes and anxieties into every match is ending.
"Watching Messi play, you felt anything could happen," Murzi said. "I've seen him do things that I don't think I'll ever see another player do."
