Lionel Messi Plays His Last Match for Argentina While Building a $1.1 Billion Empire

Table of Contents

Lionel Messi will play his 208th and last match for Argentina in a friendly against Benin in Buenos Aires, closing out his international career six weeks after the World Cup final loss to Spain.
His contract with Inter Miami runs through 2028 and is reviewed year by year, and people close to him do not expect him to leave before he has to.
Messi has already become an owner in his own right, buying fifth-tier Spanish club UE Cornella in April and adding second-division side CD Eldense on October 1, while building a business portfolio Forbes values at roughly $1.1 billion.

One Last Night in Buenos Aires

Lionel Messi is about to play his last match for Argentina. On what will be his 208th appearance for his country, the record-holder for caps and goals will say goodbye in a friendly against Benin at the Monumental in Buenos Aires.

Argentina’s greatest player, with only Diego Maradona close enough to argue the point, announced his retirement from the national team on August 31, six weeks after the World Cup final defeat to Spain, saying he had nothing more to give. Coach Lionel Scaloni has said Messi could still change his mind and come back if he wanted to, and that there would be no embarrassment in doing so. That chapter looks closed regardless.

His club career is a different matter entirely. Messi’s contract with Inter Miami runs through the end of the 2028 season, reviewed year by year, and nobody close to him expects him to walk away a day before he has to. If anything, people around him think he is more likely than not to renew it again if he feels ready for it, mentally and physically, when the time comes.

From Player to Owner

Ask the people around Messi what comes after his playing days and they smile, pointing out that he has never really planned beyond his next game. Even so, the outline of what is coming is already visible. He intends to stay inside football, unable to imagine life without it, while his other interests already stretch well beyond the sport.

Messi has previously said he would rather be an owner than a coach, reasoning that a coach lives and dies by every Saturday and has too many things to worry about. An owner, in his view, shapes a club’s direction from a step back, though those close to him say he would not be the kind of owner who approves a manager and then disappears. He wants to be involved in everything.

The groundwork is already being laid in Spain. Messi bought UE Cornella, a fifth-tier club on the edge of Barcelona that serves as a nursery for young players, in April. On October 1, CD Eldense, a second-division club, announced Messi as its new owner, a deal still subject to authorization from the Spanish sports council. Eldense will become the flagship of his football operation, though the target this season is simply to avoid relegation, which is why former Villarreal boss Javi Calleja got the job once the new ownership arrived.

Messi follows every Eldense match closely on his computer. After the club beat Real Oviedo 4-1, his first message as owner was an Instagram post that read simply, “Aupa Deportivo.” Around a dozen sponsors reportedly approached the club within days of the news breaking, some of them brands that had talked to the previous owners without ever closing a deal, and others that already had ties to Messi himself.

A Network of Clubs, and Limits to How Far It Spreads

Spain is not the only country where Messi now owns part of the game. In Uruguay, he and Luis Suarez founded Deportivo LSM in May 2025, and the club won promotion to the country’s third tier in its very first season. There was early talk of building a wider network of clubs, but the money required to lift several teams up their respective divisions has cooled that idea for now, and it is not on the table.

Miami is part of his plans too. As part of his existing contract, Messi will hold shares in Inter Miami once he retires, though a franchise entirely of his own is not part of the plan. A return to Newell’s Old Boys, the Rosario club where he played as a boy, has never been formally discussed, even if the idea has possibly crossed his mind over mate with Suarez the same way a return to Barcelona, or a spell at Napoli, the club of Maradona, sometimes has. Nobody close to Messi expects any of those moves. Everything is built around Europe and Miami, with the family’s long-term home already set up in Castelldefels, near the sea and close to Barcelona.

Hotels, Mate and a Restaurant Chain

Youth football is the other project close to Messi’s daily life, visible in his regular presence at his son’s matches and at the Messi Cup. He funds a tournament for under-16 academies that began in 2025 with eight teams. Organizers expected him to attend one or two games that year, maybe just the final, but he sat through every match of every day instead. This year the field has doubled to 16 teams, starting October 25 at Inter Miami’s training facilities in Florida, with academies from Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Arsenal and UE Cornella all involved.

Away from the pitch, Messi has built a business portfolio that helps explain why Forbes put his net worth at roughly $1.1 billion in June, with earnings of around $140 million over the previous year split between football and business. His best-known deal remains a lifetime partnership with Adidas, signed in 2017. The most visible piece of his portfolio is MiM Hotels, six boutique properties stretching from Ibiza to Andorra, which hotel group Melia has run under a rental agreement beginning November 1, 2025. In Rosario, his family firm is invested in Carrasco M, a development of 24 homes along the Parana river, with Angel Di Maria’s property agency handling sales. He is also a partner in the restaurant chain El Club de la Milanesa, which plans to open five branches in Catalonia, and he has a mate drinkware collection with Stanley, the brand’s first multi-year deal with an athlete, for which he gave his own input on materials and colors.

The business side of Messi’s life began with his father. Jorge Messi managed his son’s affairs from the start, and some of his early advice led the family into trouble with Spanish tax authorities. The operation grew from there into separate branches covering television production, marketing, media and commercial partnerships, all well established by the time Jorge fell seriously ill. He died in August at age 68. Messi trusts the people who run those branches today, several of them with him from his earliest days at Barcelona, and a thorough filtering process means he only takes on what he is personally comfortable with.

Speaking at the America Business Forum in Miami last November, Messi summed up where his head is at as the playing side of his career enters its final stretch: “Business is something that interests me. I would like to keep learning because I know nothing and I am just starting out.” The portfolio his circle has built already looks substantial. He is still out looking for more reasons to keep playing for as long as he can.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.