Lionel Messi has published a farewell letter to his father. Jorge Messi died on Saturday 8 August at the age of 68, at the Sanatorio Centro in Rosario, after a long illness. Four days later, his son posted the letter to Instagram. “Dad, I still can’t believe you’re gone,” it opens. “It hasn’t sunk in, or rather, I don’t want it to sink in.” The letter was written in Spanish, and renderings of individual lines vary slightly between translations.
Much of it is about a tournament the two of them went through apart. Jorge was seriously ill throughout the 2026 World Cup and could not travel to it, and Messi writes that he kept going in the hope of reaching the final so his father would have something to watch. Argentina reached it and lost 1-0 to Spain in extra time at MetLife Stadium. “Every time a match ended, I waited for and missed your message,” Messi writes. “That’s when I realised the situation was really serious.”
He is unusually direct about his own state in that final. “My legs had nothing left,” he writes. “This time, I tried to push through my physical limitations, but I couldn’t. I never felt right.” He was 39 during the tournament and finished it with eight goals and four assists in eight matches.
The passage that has carried furthest is the one about what comes next. “I only played football, and now I have quite a few doubts that I’ll continue doing it for much longer,” he writes, and then: “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. I don’t know how to continue.” Messi has taken a leave of absence from Inter Miami, and the club has not set a date for his return.
Jorge Messi was never only a father in the stands. A former steel worker from Rosario, he was his son’s agent for the whole of his career, across the move that took a 13-year-old from Rosario to Barcelona in 2000 and the departure from the club in 2021. “You left too soon,” the letter says. “We still had a lot to enjoy together.”
