“All I ever did was play football, and now I have serious doubts about whether I’ll keep doing it for much longer.”

That line closed the open letter Lionel Messi posted on Instagram on Wednesday, his first public statement since the family lost the man who had been his father, his closest friend and his first agent. It went up five days after Jorge Messi’s death.

Jorge Messi died on Friday, 8 August at a medical clinic in Rosario after a long illness, Al Jazeera reported on the day of his death. He was 68 and left behind his wife Celia and their children Rodrigo, Matias, Maria Sol and Lionel. The family held a private wake near Rosario the following weekend.

‘I don’t know how to carry on’

The letter is written to Jorge in the second person and moves between grief for the father and gratitude for the agent who built his son’s career.

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“You were a father, a friend, and an agent. You were always exactly who you needed to be,” Messi wrote in the tribute, as reported by Buenos Aires Times.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. I don’t know how to carry on.”

He then returned to the moment his father’s absence became real.

“Every time a match ended, I would wait and hope for your message. That’s when I realised how real the situation was.”

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Argentina lost the final Jorge did not see

For the first time in his son’s career, Jorge was not there for a major tournament. Argentina reached the 2026 World Cup final in New Jersey in July and lost 1-0 to Spain, and Messi wrote that his mother had held out hope Jorge would recover in time to travel.

“I wanted to win it to bring it to you and show you a new one,” Messi wrote of the final. “I couldn’t, my legs just gave out.”

His mother, he added, “kept telling me you’d improve and be well enough to travel,” in a line from the letter picked up by Yahoo Sports. Jorge never made the trip.

What Messi’s Inter Miami contract allows

Whether the 39-year-old plays on beyond this year is a live question at his club. Messi’s Inter Miami deal runs through the 2028 season, but the contract carries mutual break options: Messi can walk away at the end of 2026, and the club can end the deal in late 2027, according to reporting by the Buenos Aires Herald on the letter.

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Nothing in the tribute commits Messi to a decision. He ended on his children instead.

“I will teach them and raise them the way you raised me.”

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