On Tuesday night, in the depths of the New Jersey stadium, Lionel Messi gathered his boys together a few minutes before the semi-final against Canada, a rival without tradition, incapable of generating the spark that the Argentine team usually uses as fuel to give itself more strength. The speeches appeal to the emotional factor, not the strategic one, and the number 10 entrusted a collective mission in tribute to an albiceleste hero who has already retired. “Let’s go to the final for Fideo!” the captain asked his teammates, like the wolf that leads his pack, in reference to Ángel Di María, still active and a starter against the Canadians, but who at 36 years of age will say goodbye to the national team this Sunday in the Copa América final, in Miami. The last connection between the Rosario natives Messi and Di María will be in their natural habitat: the finals.
How much more time Messi (37) has left in the Argentine national team is another issue, although the countdown is also on. “These are the last battles we have with Di María and Otamendi (Nicolás, defender, also 36),” acknowledged the 10 after the 2-0 against Canada, when his record machine reached the Brazilian Zizinho –figure in the 40s and 50s- as the two players who scored goals in more editions of the continental tournament, six, in the case of the Argentine from 2007 to the present –except in 2011, the only one in which he did not score-. “Surely this is my last Copa América,” added Messi, who reached 109 goals for Argentina, in a phrase that can indirectly be interpreted as a nod to his eventual presence in the 2026 World Cup, also in the United States. In any case, the Inter Miami player has already repeated that his participation in what would be his sixth World Cup, which he would arrive at 39 years of age and without his partner from Rosario, will be defined “day by day.”
A free agent after his last spell at Benfica, Di María has not yet decided where he will continue a career that in European clubs was more identified with Real Madrid (four seasons and one Champions League, in 2013-14) and Paris Saint Germain (six seasons, one with Messi, in 2021-2022) than with his brief experiences at Manchester United and Juventus. After Sunday he will announce whether he will return to his first home, Rosario Central – the classic of Newell’s, the team of his friend Messi -, if he will continue in the Portuguese team – which wants to keep him – or if he accepts the offer from Besiktas of Turkey. In any of the three cases, his adventure in the Albiceleste will end at the top.
“I hope I can finish in the best way with this shirt. It’s football and a lot of things can happen, but whatever happens on the 14th I can go out through the front door. I’ve done everything to go out through that door, I gave everything,” said Di María after reaching what will be his ninth final with the national team, if the youth categories are included. Of the 34 titles he won in his career, five were with the Albiceleste, none more important than the one at Qatar 2022.
Di María will go into the final in Miami as a specialist in finals for Argentina: he scored goals in the last three he played, all of them won. Noodle He scored against Alisson in the 1-0 against Brazil at the Maracaná in the 2021 Copa América, against Gianluigi Donnarrumma in the 3-0 against Italy at Wembley in the 2022 Conmebol-UEFA Champions Cup (a single-match tournament) and against Hugo Lloris in the 3-3 against France in the Qatar 2022 World Cup, prior to Argentina’s victory on penalties. As if that were not enough, at the start of his career in the national team, Di María also scored a key goal, the 1-0 against Nigeria in the final of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, a tournament reserved for under-23s with three exceptions. “I always gave my life for this shirt. Sometimes it didn’t happen to me, but lately, thanks to this group, it did,” he said on Tuesday, already qualified for his last final.
Although Messi’s first partner in the youth national teams was Sergio Agüero, the Messi-Di María duo ended up forming a duo that will go down in Argentina’s golden books. As it is difficult to find such a decisive partner in Diego Maradona’s career dressed in the albiceleste (perhaps Claudio Caniggia, but at a lesser level), it is possible to present the Rosario duo as the most successful partnership in Argentine football. The turning point for both was the previous Copa América, that of Brazil 2021, whose title Lionel Scaloni’s team will defend this Sunday.
The criticism of the 28 years without titles that the Albiceleste then had started with Messi but continued with Di María, who minutes after scoring the only goal of the final, in front of an empty Maracaná due to the pandemic, spoke to his family via video call while kissing the champion’s medal: “We did it, one day the wall was going to break. The wall broke. I gave it to myself many times, but I continued to be here, I never gave up, as I was always taught.” Last week, already in the middle of the 2024 Copa América, Netflix released the documentary Angel Di Maria: Breaking the wall.
The wall had been hard, made of concrete. After his first two titles in youth, the U-20 World Cup in Canada in 2007 and the 2008 Olympic Games, Di María had to live with what was beginning to be called his curse in the finals. In the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Fideo was injured in the quarter-finals against Belgium and did not recover in time for the decisive match against Germany. Hours before, the Argentine team received a letter from Real Madrid in which, according to Di María, his club at the time asked him not to play.
As the winger would later tell the site The Players Tribune“Real Madrid wanted to buy James Rodríguez after the World Cup and I knew they wanted to sell me to make room for him. So they didn’t want their player to break down before selling him. That’s the kind of business that people don’t always see.” Di María tore up the letter, although in the end the Argentine coach, Alejandro Sabella, did not include him among the starters or substitutes. The next two finals, both Copa América against Chile, accentuated that frustration and almost turned him into a stigma: in 2015 he was injured after 29 minutes and had to come off and in 2016, after a tear in the first match of the tournament, he was also unable to complete the match. At that time, there was talk of Di María’s physical and mental fragility, and many thought he was finished.
Seventh all-time top scorer for the Albiceleste with 30 goals, placing Di María in a historical ranking of figures of the Argentine national team would be a subjective game in which the Rosario native would deserve, at the very least, a very prominent place. And the end is still to come: the lord of the finals will say goodbye where it should be, in his favourite moment.
