The 2022 World Cup champion was given a raucous sendoff with plenty of pomp and circumstance. Read Pablo Iglesias Maurer’s minute-by-minute report.

Guardian reader Paul reached out via email and is apparently deep in the comments section of a 20-year-old Messi article we published here at the Guardian. I can only hope Guardian reader “snafuclarke” has fully recovered from such a scorchingly terrible take:

don’t kid yourselves. messi is currently hugely overrated. the amount of hype this lad gets has never matched his performances on the pitch the last game aside.