Lionel Messi, 39, an eight-time Ballon d’Or winner who captained Argentina to victory at the 2022 World Cup and helped the nation reach the 2026 final, has said he is unsure whether he will continue playing “much longer” following the death of his father and long-time agent, Jorge Messi, who died on August 8 at the age of 68 after a long illness. Messi, who remains under contract with Inter Miami until 2028, posted an emotional tribute to his father on Instagram in the days following his death.
There is a particular kind of grief reserved for those who lose the person who built them. For Lionel Messi, that person was never just his father. He was the man who first believed a small, shy boy could be the best footballer who ever lived, and the man who then spent decades proving himself right.
Jorge Messi became his son’s agent when Lionel was fourteen years old, long before the goals, the Ballon d’Ors, or the World Cup. He was there for all of it. And now, in the rawest public statement of his career, Lionel Messi has admitted he does not know how to continue without him.
Rosario, Argentina: The words Messi chose, in a message posted to Instagram, were not the polished tribute of a global icon managing his image. They were the words of a son.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” Messi wrote. “I don’t know how to carry on. I used to just play football, and now I’m really not sure if I’ll carry on doing it for much longer.”
It is a sentence that will stop anyone who has watched Messi play across World Cups and decades of near-total dominance. Football, for Messi, was never just an occupation. It was the language he and his father spoke to each other, from the earliest trials to the podium.
A Partnership Built Before the Fame Arrived
Long before Jorge Messi negotiated contracts, he was simply a father trying to get his son noticed. He shepherded Lionel through the slow, unglamorous years before the world understood what it was watching.
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That bond never loosened, even as his son became arguably the greatest player the sport has produced. Jorge remained his agent throughout, a constant in a career defined by change — clubs, countries, teammates, eras. He was there for Barcelona’s years. He was there when Messi finally lifted the World Cup with Argentina in 2022, the missing line on a résumé that had, until then, seemed almost unfairly incomplete.
The Signs That Were There All Along
Messi’s Instagram post offered a haunting piece of context to those who had followed his emotions closely through the 2026 tournament. “You were by my side from the very beginning,” he wrote. “We were so close to the end. Why didn’t you hang in there just a little longer so we could finish this together?”
That anguish reframes a moment from earlier in the summer. After Argentina’s group-stage win over Algeria, Messi had scored twice and reacted with unusual emotion, later explaining it away as the product of “some difficult, complicated days.” At the time it read as a passing remark. In hindsight, it was Messi carrying his father’s declining health with him onto the pitch, match after match, all the way to a final that Jorge Messi would live to see finished together with his son.
The Messi family had first disclosed Jorge’s condition publicly on June 18, saying he was “experiencing health issues” and “under close medical attention.” What followed was a tournament played, in part, in the shadow of that news — and an international career that, per reports following Argentina’s final defeat, was already being quietly questioned before this latest, far heavier blow.
What Comes Next
Messi remains contracted to Inter Miami until 2028, and nothing in his statement constitutes a formal announcement of retirement, either from club football or the Argentina shirt. But grief of this magnitude rarely resolves itself on a fixed timeline, and few inside the game will rush to interpret his words as anything other than exactly what they were: an honest man, in his lowest moment, unsure of the road ahead.
For now, the football world will simply wait — for Messi to grieve, for clarity on his international future, and for the day he decides whether the boy Jorge Messi once believed in still has more to give the game that shaped both their lives.
