Lionel Messi on Monday, at 39, announced he’s retiring from international football

File Pic – Argentina’s Lionel Messi kisses the trophy after winning the World Cup in 2022. (AP/PTI Photo)

Lionel Messi on Monday, at 39, announced he’s retiring from international football . Messi shared in an Instagram post more than a month after Argentina’s defeat in the 2026 World Cup final, the tournament where he spent close to two-thirds of his time on the pitch. 28 Jul 2026 | 16:38 Long before any of the trophies, back when Messi was around ten years old, he was noticeably smaller than every other kid on the pitch, and had simply stopped growing. He stood about 1.27 metres tall, roughly four foot two. It took a trial at Barcelona in 2000, and a coaching staff willing to bet on a kid who barely reached their waist, before the club agreed to cover the rest of his treatment once he moved to Spain at thirteen. All of it shows up in the man who just decided, at 39, weeks after burying his father, that this was finally the moment to stop wearing the Argentina shirt.

Because messi’s entire adult career happened after doctors told his family his body might not develop normally, the first lesson is that being behind physically doesn’t mean being behind for good,. Because his family kept searching for answers and Barcelona chose to step in with money the family couldn’t raise alone, the second is that asking for help isn’t weakness, since the whole story only continues.

“After the time that has passed since the final, and after giving it a lot of thought, I want to let everyone know that I am retiring from the Argentina national team,” he wrote. “Today, after what happened with my dad, I am even more convinced than before,” Messi added. It’s because it complicates the easy version of the story, the one where a “natural” just happens to be the best in the world.

Then his father, Jorge Messi, died on August 8th at a hospital in Rosario, the same city where that eleven-year-old boy once lived. It’s the kind of detail that makes a retirement announcement feel less like a press release and more like something private that spilled into public view. His doctor in Argentina, after more than a year of tests, diagnosed him with growth hormone deficiency, a condition where the pituitary gland doesn’t produce enough of the hormone that drives normal physical development. Left untreated, it doesn’t just mean staying short. It can mean delayed puberty, weak bone density, and muscles that never build the way they should, which for a kid whose entire dream depended on a strong, durable body was about as cruel a diagnosis as it gets. Here’s the detail that tends to stop people mid-sentence when they first hear it: the treatment worked, but it wasn’t cheap, and it wasn’t glamorous. It cost somewhere between nine hundred and fifteen hundred dollars a month, depending on which account you read, at a time when Messi’s father was a steelworker and his mother worked part-time as a cleaner. That was money the family simply didn’t have. Clubs in Argentina admired what Messi could do with a ball, but none of them were willing to fund the injections. If that trial had gone differently, or if Barcelona’s scouts had looked away, doctors have estimated Messi might never have grown past four foot seven. The third is that some of the hardest work happens where nobody’s watching, and a nightly injection in an empty bedroom is about as far from a stadium spotlight as it gets. The fourth is that a setback can quietly become the reason someone works harder than everyone around them, since teammates who described young Messi at La Masia often mention his passion, not just his gift. And the fifth is that showing up consistently, for years, on days that feel completely unremarkable, tends to matter more in the end than any single dazzling moment. There’s a reason this particular detail about Messi resurfaces every time he makes news, whether it’s a World Cup win or, now, a retirement. The real version has a boy giving himself shots in the leg, a family stretching money that didn’t stretch far enough, and a football club making a financial bet nobody was obligated to make. Looking for trusted parenting advice? Follow TOI Parenting Circle on Instagram for expert guidance, relatable stories, and practical tips delivered every day.

He added a footnote explaining he’d actually written those words weeks earlier, but held off posting them.