International football has lost its grandest experience, which was watching Lionel Messi. Time, grief and wear and tear took its inescapable toll on the Argentine, who announced his retirement on Monday through a post on Instagram. There is a sense of loss and mourning, because no one player has had such a vast impact on a major sport’s footprint as Messi. He scored goals, hatched assists, won trophies and honours, conquered glory and immortality. But most poignantly, he embodied the beauty in the beautiful game.

In 21 years at the pinnacle of the sport, he saw the game transform from the preserve of artistes to that shaped by athletes, the game getting brutally physical, the movements predetermined in the board-room. But Messi remained as he was when he first burst through — a shapeshifting genius immune to the changes around him. Roles, positions, and hairdos changed, but the magnificence of Messi’s game remained untarnished. He came closest to the sport’s ideal as anyone ever has. His genius was simple and uncomplicated, football with a frictionless lightness, a complicated game made to look ridiculously simple, a task of merely finding angles and spaces, precision and perfection, of brush-stroking the ball with a swish of his left foot to the back of the net.

Advertisement

Whether he is the greatest of all time is a meaningless debate. Only Messi could measure Messi or gauge the true depth of his gifts. The two men who could have arguably judged his greatness are dead, Pele and Diego Maradona. The scale of measurable achievements would not capture the scale of immeasurable experience that was watching Messi. International football, after Messi’s departure, will be a less pleasurable feast.