Tonight, against Benin, El Monumental bids farewell to Lionel Messi from the Argentine national team. It will be a friendly with nothing at stake and all the symbolic weight in the world: the last match with the albiceleste for the player who led it to win a World Cup, two Copa América titles, and to contest another World Cup final just three months ago. Messi announced his retirement on 1 September, after losing that final to Spain and following the death of his father. He continues playing at Inter Miami, but for Argentina it ends today.
The emotional impact on the country is obvious and needs no explanation. The economic one is less visible and considerably easier to measure than it might seem, because for a decade the AFA did not merely have the best footballer in the world: it had its main commercial asset.
The clearest evidence is in the friendlies. Since the Qatar World Cup, the federation has regularly charged between six and seven million dollars to play a match in Asia, the Middle East or the United States, a figure no other national team reached with any consistency. And the contracts made plain what was being purchased. In 2019, Morocco agreed to pay Argentina just over one million dollars for a friendly in Tangier on the condition that Messi played at least seventy minutes; he got injured, did not travel, and the Moroccan federation withheld close to half a million. In 2024, when Messi did not take the field during an Inter Miami exhibition in Hong Kong, Chinese authorities cancelled the tour the national team had planned in the country. Last year's Angola match, the most expensive in AFA history, included a requirement that the captain be called up and play.
In other words, promoters were not contracting Argentina, they were contracting Messi accompanied by Argentina. Industry intermediaries estimate that the price of a national team friendly will now drop to half or slightly more in markets where Argentina has no roots, down to around three or four million per match. That is still a great deal of money, but the difference was, quite simply, him.
The same applies to attention. The national team's Instagram account has around eighteen million followers. Messi's has over five hundred. During the last World Cup, he alone gained almost a third of all the new followers the entire squad accumulated. When the AFA presented its sponsors with reach reports in markets such as Southeast Asia, North America or India, an enormous share of that audience was his, not the shirt's.
And through the shirt runs the third channel. Argentina became one of the national teams that sells the most jerseys in the world, and according to retail industry operators, between eight and nine out of every ten personalised shirts carried his name and number. Many of those buyers had no connection to the country whatsoever: they were Messi fans wearing Argentina. That demand is the first to cool.
So far, the case for the loss holds up. The important nuance is that the AFA has spent years preparing for this day, and has done so better than it is usually given credit for.
The key piece is the contract with Adidas, renewed in 2024 through 2038, at the very peak of the team's commercial valuation. It is an agreement with the federation, not with any individual player, and its fixed component does not depend on who wears the armband. What will suffer is the variable portion, the royalties on shirt sales worldwide, but the floor is secured for the next twelve years. On top of that sits an aggressive commercial policy: the federation has gone from five sponsors in 2017 to one hundred this year, distributed across regions and categories. Losing two or three that were tied to Messi's image does not destabilise a portfolio like that.
Nor will the domestic market move. In 2023, Argentina played in La Paz against Bolivia with Messi on the bench, and the match led the country's ratings with more than thirty points across free-to-air and pay television combined. The Argentine fan watches their national team regardless of who plays. The risk lies outside, in the neutral viewer who only switched on the television to watch the genius.
And there are precedents that counsel against overstating the case. France lost Zidane in 2006, endured two sporting failures, and still signed with Nike in 2008 the most expensive kit deal in the history of international football. Brazil saw Ronaldo retire and continued expanding its sponsor portfolio, because behind him came Kaká, Ronaldinho and then Neymar. A great national team does not depend on a single figure when there is competition between brands to kit it out and a credible successor on the pitch. Argentina has both: Adidas locked in and a generation of starters at major European clubs who have just reached another World Cup final.
What Argentina loses, then, is an extraordinary premium. For twenty years it charged above what a great national team is worth because it had something no one else could offer, and that premium disappears today. What it keeps is what it built while it had it: a brand of its own, a long-term contract and a fan base that does not need stars to switch on the television.
Tonight El Monumental will mourn the player. The AFA, if it has done its sums correctly, will only have to say goodbye to a surcharge.
