Lionel Messi plays his 208th and final game for Argentina on Tuesday, a friendly against Benin at the Monumental in Buenos Aires. He is the country's record appearance holder and record scorer, and he announced on 31 August, six weeks after the World Cup final defeat by Spain, that he had nothing left to give. Lionel Scaloni has made a point of saying the door stays open and that changing your mind is no disgrace. Nobody around the player expects him to walk back through it.
He would rather own a club than manage one
The club career is not finished. His Inter Miami deal runs to the end of the 2028 season but is reviewed year by year, and people close to him expect a renewal if he still feels right physically and mentally. What happens after that has taken shape faster than most people realise, because Messi has been buying football clubs.
He picked up UE Cornella, a fifth-tier side on the edge of Barcelona, in April. CD Eldense, in the Spanish second division, announced him as owner on 1 October, subject to sign-off from the CSD, the Spanish sports council. Eldense is the one he intends to build the operation around. The stated aim this season is simply to stay up, and former Villarreal manager Javi Calleja took the job as the new owner arrived.
Asked recently whether he would rather be a coach or an owner, Messi chose owner. The reasoning is characteristically practical: a coach lives and dies by Saturday and has to worry about too many things at once, whereas an owner shapes a club from further back, which suits a man who has spent twenty years being asked to decide everything inside ninety minutes. He watches every Eldense match on his computer. After they beat Real Oviedo 4-1, his first public message as owner was an Instagram post reading "Aupa Deportivo".
There is a third club already. He and Luis Suarez founded Deportivo LSM in Uruguay in May 2025 and won promotion to the country's third tier in the first season. A wider network of clubs was discussed early on and quietly dropped once somebody added up what it costs to push teams up divisions. He will also take shares in Inter Miami when he retires, as part of his playing contract. A franchise of his own is not in the plan. A sentimental return to Newell's Old Boys in Rosario, the club he played for as a child, has never been formally raised with anyone, though it has presumably crossed his mind over mate with Suarez in the same idle way that Barcelona or Napoli might have.
The money, and where it came from
Forbes put his net worth at roughly 1.1 billion dollars in June, with about 140 million dollars earned over the previous year across football and business. The Adidas deal he signed for life in 2017 is still the best known piece. The most visible is MiM Hotels, six boutique properties stretching from Ibiza to Andorra, named after Messi and the Majestic group and run by Melia under a rental agreement since 1 November 2025.
Beyond that it gets granular. His family firm has money in Carrasco M, a 24-home development by the Parana river in Rosario, with sales handled by Angel Di Maria's property agency. He is a partner in the restaurant chain El Club de la Milanesa, which plans five branches in Catalonia starting in Castelldefels, where the family home is. He has a mate collection with Stanley, the drinkware company's first multi-year deal with an athlete, and he weighed in on the materials and the colours himself.
All of it traces back to his father. Jorge Messi, who died in August aged 68, ran his son's affairs from the beginning, and some of that early advice landed the family in trouble with the Spanish tax authorities. The company grew anyway, into television production, marketing, media and commercial partnerships, and it was all established by the time Jorge became seriously ill.
Sixteen academies and a man who sits through every game
The other obsession is youth football. The Messi Cup, an Under-16 tournament he funds, began in 2025 with eight teams. Organisers expected him at a game or two, maybe the final. He turned up and sat through every match on every day. This year it doubles to 16 teams from 25 October at Inter Miami's facilities in Florida, with Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Arsenal and his own UE Cornella among them. Newell's are in it too, which is as close to a homecoming as anyone is getting.
Speaking at the America Business Forum in Miami last November, he said business interested him and that he wanted to keep learning because he knew nothing and was only starting out. That is either modesty or a man who understands exactly how much of his portfolio runs on his name. Either way, Tuesday night ends one thing and almost nothing else.
Context: Messi, Argentina's record scorer and most-capped player, makes his 208th and final international appearance against Benin at the Monumental on Tuesday 6 October 2026. He announced his international retirement on 31 August 2026. Reporting by Guillem Balague for BBC Sport.
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