Last dance: Lionel Messi's best moments with Argentina

Lionel Messi's best moments with Argentina are not a single goal. They are the 2021 Copa América, the 2022 Finalissima, the World Cup final in Lusail, the 2024 Copa América, and a 2026 World Cup that ended in a final loss to Spain. The last dance is still ahead. Argentina play Benin at the Más Monumental on Tuesday 6 October 2026, at 20:00 in Buenos Aires, 23:00 UTC. That night is not on this list until it has been played.

What belongs on a list like this

A best-moments page is easy to stuff. Every free kick, every qualifier, every lap of honour can be dragged in until the list means nothing. This one stays with the nights that changed the story of Messi and the Argentina shirt, and with the nights that explain why the shirt took so long to feel finished. Club goals are not here. Barcelona and Inter Miami are a different book. The picture at the top is four frames of him in the Argentina shirt, one of them with the World Cup in his hand. It is a collage, not a photograph from Buenos Aires on 6 October.

The order below is the order the career actually moved. The teenage tournaments come first, then the finals that hurt, then the run that started in 2021. The 2026 World Cup sits near the end because it was the last tournament, not because it was the happiest. Benin sits after all of that, as a match that has a date and a kick-off and no result.

A red card, then a first goal

The senior career did not open with a wonder goal. Messi came on for Argentina against Hungary in August 2005 and was sent off. That is the debut. People who start the story at the World Cup skip the part where the first image of him in the shirt was a red card. He was 18. The noise around him was already louder than the match.

The first goal came on 1 March 2006, against Croatia in Basel. From that afternoon to the last goal of the 2026 World Cup is a straight line of almost twenty years. The count carried into this window is 207 appearances and 125 goals. Benin would be the next cap if he plays, and a goal that night would be a new number. Neither of those sentences can be written in the past tense yet.

The tournaments he won before he was the captain

In 2005, still a teenager, he was the best player at the Under-20 World Cup. He scored six times, including twice in the final against Nigeria, and he took the Golden Boot and the Golden Ball. Argentina won the tournament. It is easy to treat that summer as a preface. It was a full trophy, with him as the player the final turned on.

Three years later he was in the Olympic side that won gold in Beijing. He scored in the final. The gold medal is sometimes filed under youth football and left off the senior list. He was already a senior international by then. The medal is part of the Argentina career, not a side note that only matters to people collecting youth honours.

Those two tournaments matter for a farewell week because they show the wait was not a wait for talent. The goals were there early. The senior trophy was not. Anyone who writes the story as if 2021 came from nowhere is skipping a decade and a half in which he was already the best player on the pitch and the team still went home without the cup.

The finals that did not go his way

The 2014 World Cup is the clearest of those near misses. Argentina reached the final. Germany won it after extra time. Messi was given the Golden Ball as the player of the tournament. A Golden Ball without the cup is a strange prize. It says he was the best footballer in a competition his team did not win. He would win the Golden Ball again in 2022. No one else has won that award twice. In 2014 it did not feel like a record. It felt like a loss.

The Copa América finals of 2015 and 2016 were harder in a different way. Chile beat Argentina on penalties in both, the second of them in the Centenario on United States soil. After the second final he stepped away from the national team. The retirement did not hold. He came back. The two Chile nights are still on the record, and they explain the weight people put on 2021. A player who has lost finals on penalties does not get to treat the next final as a normal game.

There were other exits, other group games, other nights when the shot hit the post or the pass was a yard long. They do not all earn a paragraph. The point of those years is the pattern. He was there. The trophy was not. By the time Scaloni's team started to look like a settled side, the argument around Messi and Argentina was no longer about whether he was good enough. It was about whether the ending would ever match the rest of it.

The Maracanã, 10 July 2021

The first senior trophy came in the place that had haunted Argentine football for other reasons. Argentina beat Brazil 1-0 in the Copa América final at the Maracanã. Ángel Di María scored the goal. Messi did not. He was still the player of the tournament, and he was the captain who had carried the side through the weeks before it. The 28-year gap without a senior title closed on that night, not on a Messi solo goal. That is worth saying plainly. The moment people remember is the lap, the medal, the way the team looked when the whistle went. The goal was Di María's.

It changed the next two years. A team that has just won a Copa América does not walk into a World Cup as a side still looking for proof. The proof was one match, 1-0, against the neighbour, in their stadium. Everything after it, including the friendlies and the qualifiers, sat on top of that result. When people now say the farewell is a celebration, the celebration starts here, not in Lusail.

Wembley, 1 June 2022

Less than a year later Argentina played the first Finalissima, against Italy, at Wembley. They won 3-0. The goals were Lautaro Martínez, Ángel Di María and Paulo Dybala. Messi was the captain of a side that no longer looked surprised to be winning a final. Italy were the European champions. The score did not look like a cagey final between two champions. It looked like a team that had decided the old nerves were someone else's problem.

Wembley is the quiet trophy in the set. It does not have the noise of a World Cup, and it does not have the rivalry of a Copa América final against Brazil. It still counts. It was another cup, in June, with the World Cup six months away. The unbeaten run around that match is part of why Qatar did not feel like a rescue job. The side arrived as champions of South America and winners of the Finalissima, not as a team hoping the captain would drag them through one more tournament.

Lusail, 18 December 2022

Ask for one moment and this is the one most people mean. The World Cup final against France finished 3-3 after extra time. Argentina won 4-2 on penalties. Messi scored from the penalty spot, scored again in extra time, and then scored in the shootout. Kylian Mbappé scored three for France. The match is the one final of this century that does not need a highlight package to be remembered. People who were not watching still know the shape of it.

He had scored in every round of that World Cup, from the group through to the final. The Golden Ball was his for the second time, after 2014. Argentina's World Cup was their third. The photograph of him with the trophy is the frame in the collage that does the most work. Everything else in the Argentina story is either a step toward that night or a night that came after it and had to live with it.

The final also settled an argument that had gone on for too long. You can still prefer another player. You cannot say the Argentina career ended without the one trophy the argument was about. That is why a farewell in 2026 can be a party and a sad evening at the same time. The main thing has already happened. The Monumental is not being asked to supply a World Cup. It is being asked to supply a goodbye.

Miami, 14 July 2024

The Copa América of 2024 was the defence of the title, played in the United States, and it ended in Miami. Argentina beat Colombia 1-0 after extra time at Hard Rock Stadium. Lautaro Martínez scored. Messi went off in the second half with an ankle injury. He was not on the pitch for the goal that won it. He was there for the lift of the trophy.

That is a different kind of best moment from Lusail. In the World Cup final he scored twice and took a penalty in the shootout. In Miami the team won the final with him watching the last part of it. The trophy still belongs to the same run. Back to back Copa América titles, with the World Cup in between, is the spell the University of Buenos Aires cited when it voted him a Doctor Honoris Causa. The honorary doctorate is due on the same Tuesday as Benin, before kick-off. The diploma does not add a goal. It is the university's way of saying the run was about more than the cups.

The ankle in Miami is also a reminder that the body at a farewell is not the body from 2022. He is 39. A start against Benin is expected. The number of minutes is not confirmed. Treating the Monumental night as if he will play the full match, score, and walk off to a planned script is how people invent a moment before the match exists.

The 2026 World Cup

The last tournament was not a lap of honour. Messi scored a hat-trick against Algeria. He scored eight times in the competition. His last goal of that World Cup was the equaliser against Egypt in the round of 16, in a game Argentina won 3-2. He finished with 21 goals at World Cups. Argentina reached the final again and lost it to Spain. The retirement from international football was said after that final, in August. The farewell against Benin was arranged later, so the goodbye could happen in Buenos Aires instead of in the noise of a tournament exit.

A best-moments list that hides the Spain final is a fan edit. The hat-trick and the eight goals are real. The final loss is also real. He leaves the World Cup as a winner from 2022 and a runner-up from 2026, with the 2014 final still on the same page. Three World Cup finals is its own sentence. Only one of them ended with him lifting the cup. That is the honest count.

The Egypt goal is the last one on the record from a competitive match. It is not, by itself, the last goal of the Argentina career. Benin is a friendly, and friendlies count on the cap list if he plays. A goal against Benin would sit after Egypt. Until the match is played, Egypt remains the last one that actually happened.

What the Benin night can still become

The fixture is Argentina vs Benin, Tuesday 6 October 2026, at the Más Monumental. Kick-off is 20:00 in Buenos Aires, which is 23:00 UTC. He was held out of the Bolivia and Burkina Faso friendlies so this would be the match. De Paul, Lo Celso and Otamendi were held for the same night. The number 10 is his for Benin. Scaloni has said nobody else wears it in the two games before. The number has not been retired.

None of that is a moment yet. A sold-out stadium is a fact about tickets. A doctorate before the anthems is a fact about the university. A collage of old photographs is a fact about the career up to now. The match itself is still a teamsheet, a whistle, and whatever he does with the minutes he is given. If he scores, that goal joins this page later. If he plays twenty minutes and walks off, that is the moment, and it does not need a goal to count. If a knock keeps him to the bench, the page has to say that too.

The useful way to watch the farewell is to know which nights already happened, so this one is not asked to repeat them. He is not going to win another World Cup on a Tuesday in Núñez. He might wear the shirt one last time in front of the crowd that waited through the Chile finals and the Germany final and then got the Maracanã, Wembley, Lusail and Miami. That is enough of a reason for the match. It is not a reason to write the ending before 20:00.

Questions people ask

Conclusion

Lionel Messi's best moments with Argentina run from a red card on debut to a World Cup, with a long stretch of finals in between that did not go his way. The senior titles are the 2021 Copa América, the 2022 Finalissima, the 2022 World Cup and the 2024 Copa América. The 2026 World Cup added a hat-trick and a final defeat. The last dance against Benin is on 6 October at the Más Monumental, at 20:00. It is not a best moment until the match has been played.

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