Dad, I Still Can't Believe You're Gone: Messi's Heartbreaking Goodbye

Lionel Messi has spent most of his life finding ways to express himself with a football. On Wednesday, he was searching for words to say goodbye to the man who had been there almost from the first kick.

“Dad, I still can't believe you're gone.”

Jorge Messi, Lionel Messi's father, longtime agent, adviser and one of the central figures in his extraordinary football journey, died at a clinic in Rosario after a prolonged illness. He was 68.

For Messi, the grief is intertwined with one final football memory: the 2026 World Cup. His father had wanted him to play. Messi had hoped Jorge would recover enough to watch him. Neither got the ending they wanted.

"You kept asking me to play in that last World Cup, but just days before it started, your condition took a turn for the worse,” Messi wrote in an emotional Instagram tribute. “I kept telling you we'd make it to the final so you could come.”

Argentina did make the final. Spain beat the defending champions 1-0, denying Messi another World Cup title after a tournament in which he scored eight goals and provided four assists.

But behind Argentina's run was another battle few watching Messi knew he was fighting. After every game, Messi waited for a message from his father. It didn't come.

“That's when I realised how serious the situation really was.”

Still, he kept playing and kept hoping. Every additional round meant more time for Jorge to recover. Messi wanted to reach the final partly because he believed his father might still be able to make it.

He also wanted one more trophy for him. “We made it to the final, but you couldn't be there. I wanted to win it so I could bring it to you and show you a new trophy,” Messi wrote. Then came an unusually raw admission from a footballer who has spent two decades making the extraordinary look effortless.

“I couldn't do it; my legs just gave out.”

Messi said he had pushed himself beyond his physical limits during the tournament but “never felt right”.

There would be another heartbreak after he returned home. His father believed Argentina had lost the final on penalties. Father and son never got the opportunity to properly talk about what had happened. It was an extraordinary absence for two men accustomed to talking almost every day.

Jorge had been there long before the Ballon d'Ors, Barcelona records, World Cup glory and global superstardom. A former steel-factory supervisor, he became his son's agent and strategic adviser after Lionel's career took off.

When Messi was a child, Jorge would return from work and take him to training. He rarely missed a match. Later, he helped facilitate the move that changed everything. At 13, Messi left Argentina for Barcelona's youth academy in Spain, with the Catalan club covering the cost of treatment for his growth hormone deficiency.

The relationship evolved as Messi's career did: Father, friend, agent. “You were always exactly who you needed to be in any given moment,” Messi wrote.

There were disagreements and arguments, Messi acknowledged, but he came to believe that his father usually saw things before he did. “In the end, things always turned out just the way you said they would.”

Now, at 39, Messi is confronting a question that goes beyond another season or another trophy. How does he continue without the man who accompanied him almost all the way?

“I don't know what I'm going to do without you; I don't know how to go on.”

Messi also revealed that the loss has deepened his doubts about how much longer he wants to keep playing football. “All I ever did was play soccer, and now I have serious doubts about whether I'll keep doing it for much longer,” he wrote. Then came perhaps the most painful question in the tribute. “Why couldn't you hold on just a little longer so we could finish this journey together?”

As messages of condolence poured in, one came from the man who spent much of Messi's career standing on the opposite side of football's greatest individual rivalry: Cristiano Ronaldo.

There were no comparisons, records or arguments over who was greater this time. Just one footballer reaching out to another who had lost his father.

“A huge hug to you and yours in these tough times, Leo. Much strength,” Ronaldo wrote in a comment on Messi's Instagram post.

Messi also thanked supporters for the messages and gestures his family had received, particularly for respecting their privacy while they grieved.

His own farewell, however, returned to something much more intimate than football. Messi said Jorge would remain present in the way he raises his own children. The values his father and mother gave him would now travel another generation.

“I'm going to miss you terribly, but you'll always be with me,” he wrote.

And then, after a lifetime shared through training grounds, stadiums, trophies, defeats and countless conversations, the son signed off. “Thank you for everything. I love you, Dad.”

(With inputs from ANI)