The interview is nearly three years old. Messi gave it to ESPN in December 2023. What has changed is the context in which people are reading it back.

On 31 August 2026, Messi announced he was retiring from the Argentina national team. With 21 years of international football now closed off behind him, the smaller admissions Messi has made about himself along the way are being pulled back out.

The one about Lewandowski is the most revealing of them.

The Ballon d’Or slight that stuck

The backdrop is the 2021 Ballon d’Or, which Messi collected for the seventh time. In his acceptance speech he made a point of arguing that Lewandowski, denied the 2020 award when the ceremony was canceled during the pandemic, deserved to be handed that trophy retrospectively.

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Lewandowski’s public reply was that he hoped Messi’s remarks were “sincere and not just empty words.” That line stayed with the Argentine.

“Lewandowski’s statement in 2021 bothered me because when I won the Ballon d’Or, I said what I really felt,” Messi told ESPN.

The Poland night, and a dribble on purpose

The two met on the pitch a year later. Argentina and Poland closed Group C at Qatar 2022 with a match Argentina controlled from start to finish, Alexis Mac Allister and Julian Alvarez scoring in a 2-0 win on 30 November 2022 that pushed both sides into the last 16. Lewandowski, kept quiet all evening, did not manage a shot on goal.

That was the game Messi described to ESPN.

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“I ignored him during the game because it was him and I was angry and thought he shouldn’t have said what he said. I was very angry.”

Asked whether he was going at Lewandowski with the ball on purpose because of who was in front of him, Messi did not soften the answer.

“If I was deliberately dribbling because it was him? Yes,” he told ESPN, according to Bolavip.

There is a well-known image from the match of Messi turning away from a Lewandowski handshake attempt. In the interview he framed it as the same thing: he did not want to speak to the Poland captain that night, because it was him.

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The thaw came at Barcelona

The story does not end at the final whistle in Doha. Messi has said the two eventually cleared the air.

“After that we met, talked and agreed that it was a misunderstanding,” he told ESPN. “He was upset because what he said didn’t fully match with what was on the internet.”

Lewandowski’s own account has been in the same key. He has since put the row down to a mistranslation of his original comments on Messi’s Ballon d’Or speech, and said there is no personal issue between them.

He had moved to Barcelona in the summer of 2022, and Messi’s ESPN interview describes their later conversations circling “the club, the city and everything.” Messi plays on with Inter Miami in Major League Soccer.

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