On 22 September, Lionel Messi posted a video that lasted a few seconds and did not need to be any longer. He reaches up to the wall, takes down the shirt he wore in the World Cup final, and hangs another one in its place. The caption is four words: One last match… a jersey for a lifetime.
The shirt is Argentina’s. It is gold where the last one was not, and he will wear it for the final time against Benin at the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires on 6 October 2026.
What he will actually wear
The shirt adidas and the AFA built for the occasion is not the Argentina shirt you already have in your head. The sky blue stays, but the run of narrow vertical bands is gone. In its place there is a single broad white stripe down the centre of the chest, running from the collar to the hem.
Then the light moves. Fine tonal rays fan out from the middle of the shirt, front and back, borrowed from the Sun of May — the emblem that sits at the centre of Argentina’s flag and on top of the AFA crest. On the back, MESSI 10 is printed in gold and set inside those rays, with a small sun tucked below the rear collar. The crest on the chest carries its three stars in the same gold. The crew neck and the sleeve cuffs are black, edged in gold.
Gold is doing something here that a fourth star cannot. Argentina’s three stars are three World Cups — 1978, 1986 and 2022. The gold on this shirt is not a trophy. It is a full stop. It marks the shirt as the last one rather than the next one, which is a strange thing for a football kit to have to say.
One thing worth stating plainly for anyone who goes looking for it afterwards: what supporters can buy is a fan shirt made to this design. It is not the single one-off match jersey Messi pulls on at the Monumental, and it is not sold as one.
- Base — sky blue with a single broad white stripe down the centre, replacing Argentina’s classic vertical banding.
- Rays — tonal Sun-of-May rays spreading across the front and back panels, faint enough to disappear in flat light.
- Number — a gold 10 on the chest and a gold MESSI 10 on the back, framed by the sunburst.
- Crest — the AFA badge with its three stars, finished in gold.
- Trim — a black crew neck and black sleeve cuffs with gold edging, and a small Sun of May below the rear collar.
Why this match exists at all
Argentina did not plan to be here. They lost the 2026 World Cup final to Spain in extra time in July, a result plenty of people read as the natural end of Messi’s international career. In late August he confirmed it, announcing his retirement from the national team in an open letter.
The AFA went to work anyway. The Benin friendly, in the first international window of the 2026/27 season, was arranged so that the captain could be given a home send-off rather than a farewell in a neutral stadium thousands of kilometres away. Tapia has been explicit that the invitation was issued for the player rather than for the fixture list.
The match therefore exists for one reason, and everything around it — the call-up, the invitations to the 2022 squad, the shirt — follows from that decision. Friendlies are usually the least important matches on the calendar. This one has been built to be remembered.
The numbers behind twenty-one years
Messi’s first Argentina cap came on 17 August 2005, against Hungary, when he was 18. He was sent off in that game, which is not how anyone remembers the beginning now. Everything since has been record-keeping.
207 caps. 125 goals. Both are Argentina records, and both are his. The Benin friendly will be his 208th appearance and his last. He has played three World Cup finals — 2014, 2022 and 2026 — and won one of them, in Qatar. He has two Copa América titles, from 2021 and 2024, and Olympic gold from Beijing in 2008. He will be 39 years old when he walks out for the last time.
It has not been a straight line. After Argentina lost the 2016 Copa América final on penalties he said he was finished with the national team, and for a while he meant it. He came back. The Copa América five years later and the World Cup a year after that both came out of that decision, which is the part of the story worth holding on to: the last tango exists because he turned around once already.
| Match | Argentina vs Benin — international friendly |
| Date | Tuesday 6 October 2026 |
| Venue | Estadio Monumental, Buenos Aires |
| Capacity | More than 85,000 |
| The cap | 208th and final |
| The shirt | Special-edition gold MESSI 10 |
The last tango, and who will be there
Argentina play three friendlies in this international window. Bolivia in Córdoba on 30 September, Burkina Faso in Buenos Aires on 3 October, Benin at the Monumental on 6 October. Messi is not in the squad for the first two. He comes home for one night only.
We made the decision to invite the best player in the world, the symbol of our national team, our captain, Lionel Andrés Messi, so that he can have the farewell he truly deserves on October 6, here in Argentina.
Claudio Tapia, president of the Argentine Football Association, who called the night the last tango of the best player in the world.
The AFA has invited the 2022 World Cup winners and their families. Ángel Di María, who spent his own international career alongside Messi, has said he will be in the stands. Tickets went on sale on 22 September. The Monumental holds more than 85,000 and the demand goes a long way past that.
There will be tributes before kick-off, and a ceremony on the pitch after the final whistle. Football does not often get to stage something that looks like a state occasion, and it is worth noticing which player it is being staged for.
Why the shirt is the thing that lasts
A result fades quickly. Argentina beat Benin or they do not, and by the following weekend the score matters mostly to the people who were in the ground. A shirt does not work that way. It stays in the wardrobe. It gets handed down, framed, or folded into a drawer with a ticket stub inside it, and it keeps saying the same thing for thirty years.
Argentina’s No. 10 has already been through this once. Diego Maradona made the number his own across the 1980s, and those shirts have been kept, copied, reissued and argued over ever since. Messi’s version of it is twenty-one years old and about to close. When two players share a number for that long, the number stops belonging to either of them and starts belonging to the country.
That is the space this farewell shirt is designed to sit in. It is not a shirt for a season; it is a shirt for one evening, and the gold says so.
What happens after 6 October
Messi keeps playing. Inter Miami are in the middle of an MLS season and he is not retiring from club football; the Argentina chapter is the one that closes at the Monumental. Whichever way that night goes, the shirt he wears for it will be the last Argentina shirt with his name on the back — and the only one that was printed in gold.
The farewell shirt, in three cuts
The same special-edition design in a men's fit, a women's fit and youth sizes — each available with MESSI 10, blank, or your own name and number on the back.
