The number 10 shirt must not retire with Messi

When Lionel Messi announced his retirement from the Argentina national team last Monday, the reaction bordered on national mourning. Children cried in schools, journalists shed tears on television, newspapers filled their pages with emotional tributes and a telephone line was even opened for fans to express their gratitude to their idol. All weekend matches in Argentina were briefly stopped in the tenth minute as a tribute to the idol.“I emptied myself. I have nothing more to give,” Messi wrote in his farewell.It was an extraordinary end to an extraordinary relationship. For more than two decades, Messi had carried the expectations of a country that could never quite decide what it wanted him to be. He was compared endlessly with Diego Maradona, criticised for not displaying the same kind of passion and, for years, accused of somehow being less Argentinian because he had left for Barcelona as a child.Yet by the time he walked away, the relationship between Messi and Argentina had been transformed. The player once treated as an outsider had become a national symbol in his own right.“And we are full,” Jorge Valdano, a World Cup winner with Argentina in 1986, replied to Messi’s farewe...