Good news: Messi is leaving the national team. Bad news: he has not yet retired.

Although I have not yet opened the finest bottle, upon hearing the news I immediately retrieved one of my best bottles from the cellar and consumed it while watching a documentary on the Falklands, in the company of my braque (the dog, no double meaning intended). Lionel Messi has announced his retirement from the Argentine national team, a decision swiftly lamented by FIFA officials, referees and millions of supporters worldwide. In a letter that read like a primary school composition, the world’s most celebrated number 10 explained that he had reached his limit and that a new generation of talented young players was ready to step forward.

I did not open my finest bottle, because, regrettably, Messi has only left the national team, not football itself (assuming one is willing to take that after-work hobby – the US league – seriously), and yet everyone is discussing him as if he were dead. Of course, Aldo Cazzullo’s funeral dirge was inevitable; in the Corriere, he speaks soberly of a ‘sporting death’ in his article of condolence. It’s actually a rather cold piece, so much so that towards the end, like a tipsy Soriano, he had to cobble together a list of nostalgic clichés – the sort you wouldn’t even find in one of Max Pezzali’s songs – to tug at readers’ heartstrings: the ball that was too big, the inevitable abuela who tells his friends to let him play, his dad – a factory worker, of course – the contract signed on a napkin, his Catalan cousins, the girl who first turns her nose up at him and then marries him, the jostling, the defeats and, naturally, the triumphs.

The challenge posed by Messi’s departure from the national team is that, after ten years of relentless coverage exploring every conceivable angle, there is little new to add, save the observation that he somehow managed to become even more intolerable than Trump at the last World Cup. Everything has already been said and repeated ad nauseam about Messi, and the fact that, at 40, he has decided he has had enough of playing Copa América qualifiers against Paraguayan butchers—or has the realism to admit that by 2030 he will not be able to take to the pitch—cannot be treated as a tragedy, nor does it really work when told against the overused backdrop of nostalgia. Consider that the outcry over this pretend farewell lasted barely a moment – just long enough to navigate a few social media posts about a ‘mini Messi’ dribbling past everyone at three months old – and already we’ve rushed off to anxiously follow the closing stages of the transfer window.

Some have been particularly inventive, with one person referring to the ‘end of an era’, whilst another (Cazzullo again) has gone so far as to claim that his successor is Paulo Dybala (see you on Sunday in the Curva Sud, Aldo?), Some have turned a hideous mural depicting the Argentine footballer – painted in India by a self-styled local artist – into a news story, whilst others are treating the “we love you infinitely” posted by his wife on social media as a scoop. No tears for Messi, but plenty of toasts and celebrations for the end of a literary genre that had grown tiresome. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is unlikely to disappear anytime soon: readers will continue to encounter videos of his assists in Miami presented as magical feats, debates over who is more loved between him and Cristiano Ronaldo (La Pulga by the press, CR7 by the people: you be the judge), and, above all, the eternal question of “Messi or Maradona?”. The comparison is roughly equivalent to asking whether Coca-Cola is preferable to a well-poured lager.