Madness for Lionel Messi: a fan of the Argentine star got a tattoo of his farewell letter from the Argentine National Team

The news about Lionel Messi's farewell from the Argentine National Team had a special impact on Francisco Ladogana. The 38-year-old coach from La Plata, a recognized fan of Gimnasia, has maintained a deep admiration for the captain of the Albiceleste for years.

Currently residing in Guatemala, where he serves as the head coach of Aguacatán, Ladogana received Messi's announcement with sadness and made a decision just a few hours later: to tattoo the handwritten letter that the footballer had published, dated July 21, 2026.

“I decided the same day I saw the news. I got up on Monday, saw his letter, obviously sad, and didn't hesitate to get the tattoo,” Francisco Ladogana recounted.

The emotion that the announcement caused him was such that he spent a good part of that day in tears and reminiscing about the Argentine star's career: “I cried all day until I went to work, watched videos, the letter, the farewell. And I kept saying: ‘This is nothing, when he retires definitively I don't know what I'm going to do at that moment'.”

To bring the idea to fruition, that same Monday he traveled to the Capital, got in touch with a tattoo artist, and the next day began the work. The session lasted more than six hours.

The coach explained that he used technology to accurately identify the content of the letter, but insisted that the result had to respect the original version written by Messi.

“With AI, it showed perfectly what it said, but I told him I wanted to do the same, even with the mistakes. He makes mistakes and the mistakes have to be there. So I enlarged it as much as I could to tattoo it, and it was the same, even the same handwriting. I told him: 'I'm going to do the same thing',” he recounted.

He wanted to tattoo Messi's letter exactly as he wrote it

Ladogana was not looking for an adaptation or an approximate reproduction of the message. His intention was for the tattoo to preserve every detail of the original manuscript, including the writing mistakes.