nadia-rahmawati
For years, Benin has occupied an unglamorous position in African football's pecking order. Wedged beside Nigeria, a continental powerhouse with multiple Africa Cup of Nations titles and a long list of globally recognised players, the Cheetahs have largely watched from the sidelines while their neighbour commanded attention.
That dynamic shifts on Tuesday, at least for one night. Benin travel to Buenos Aires to face Argentina at the Estadio Monumental in a fixture that carries unusual historical weight: it will be Lionel Messi's final appearance in an Argentina shirt.
The match, which kicks off at midnight British time, pits the World Cup runners-up against a squad whose players earn their living in leagues across Finland, Switzerland's second division and the South African Premiership. On paper it is as lopsided as international football gets. In practice, it represents the most significant occasion in Benin's footballing history.
Argentina's build-up did little to suggest an upset is brewing. Lionel Scaloni's side crushed Burkina Faso, another west African team, 7-0 in their warm-up fixture, and few observers expect Benin to avoid a similarly heavy defeat. The evening's emotional logic lies elsewhere, with Messi's farewell rather than the scoreline.
A special-edition Argentina kit has been produced to commemorate the occasion, and the shirt Messi wears during the match could become one of the most valuable pieces of football memorabilia ever sold. Demand for such items has soared in recent years, with match-worn jerseys from defining moments fetching sums that would have seemed implausible a generation ago.
Steve Mounie, Benin's captain, has been a fixture in the national team for more than a decade. The forward plays his club football for Augsburg in the German Bundesliga and is remembered by English supporters for a four-year spell at Huddersfield Town between 2017 and 2020. Yet in all that time, he had never played a match for Benin outside Africa until this trip.
"When the coach called me and told me about this game, we didn't know it was going to be the last game of Leo Messi," Mounie told BBC Sport. He described the news as the cherry on top of the cake, adding that it lent extra significance to an event already loaded with meaning for Beninese football and for the sport globally.
Injury will keep Mounie out of the match itself, but he refused to remain at home to recover. He paid for his own plane ticket to travel with the squad, explaining that his passion for the game made the journey irresistible. He said he would prefer a place on the bench, but would accept a seat in the stands if required, simply because he wanted to witness the occasion from pitch level.
The 31-year-old believes the friendly offers Benin's selected players a rare platform to raise their profiles and, by extension, the reputation of Beninese football. He characterised his team as disciplined and technically gifted, with a willingness to press high and a collective resilience when that approach fails. "We are a team like a family," he said, drawing a parallel with Argentina's own celebrated sense of togetherness, describing Messi as a father figure to that group.
Much of the pre-match chatter, inevitably, concerns what happens after the final whistle. Doug Bierton, founder of Classic Football Shirts, said acquiring a Messi match-worn shirt is exceptionally difficult because the market understands its value. Every player on the pitch, he noted, will be angling to swap with the Argentina captain, and he pointed out that this is the first time a legend has bowed out wearing a special edition shirt.
Bierton, whose personal collection runs into the thousands, ranks the garment alongside Diego Maradona's jersey from the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England, the match defined by the "Hand of God" goal. That shirt sold for £7.1m at auction in May 2022, a figure that recalibrated expectations across the memorabilia market.
Also in that rarefied bracket is Zinedine Zidane's shirt from his final France appearance, the 2006 World Cup final against Italy, which ended with his sending-off for headbutting Marco Materazzi. The comparison is instructive: Messi's shirt will be worn in a friendly, not a tournament final, yet it is discussed in the same breath as those historic artefacts. That, perhaps, is the clearest measure of the consensus that he is the greatest player the game has produced.
For Benin, the night brings a collision of the mundane and the monumental. A squad of modest means will share a pitch with the most decorated player of his generation, in front of a sold-out crowd, on the occasion of his international farewell. Whatever the result, the Cheetahs will leave Buenos Aires with a chapter of their own history written.
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