There have been times when the weight of a nation’s febrile hopes and dreams appeared too great a burden for Lionel Messi.

It made him anxious, sick with nerves. It made the fear of failure unbearable and the pain of defeat even worse.

Fernando Signorini, Argentina’s former fitness coach, recalls seeing Messi stagger into their dressing room, zombie-like, after a crushing 4-0 defeat by Germany in the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals, and collapse to the floor. There he sat, slumped in a gap between two benches, inconsolable, shouting, wailing, howling, “almost convulsing”.

Messi never asked to be his country’s saviour. If Diego Maradona had the ebullient, rebellious personality to back up his extraordinary talent as a footballer, making him an Argentine cultural icon in the tradition of Che Guevara or Eva Peron, then Messi has always been a different type. His gifts earned him a status that was at odds with a quiet, shy, introverted nature.

Some mistook it for indifference to the national cause. Messi had left his homeland for Barcelona at the age of 13 and he mumbled his way through the national anthem before games whereas Maradona — in the stands, on the touchline, on grainy old VHS footage of his 1980s pomp — belted it out proudly and passionately. But Messi did care. Every failure on the international stage cut deep. If anything he cared too much.

By 2016, the burden felt too great. He had been to three World Cups: twice a beaten quarter-finalist, once a beaten finalist. Now came a fourth consecutive failure at the Copa America: a beaten finalist for a third time when, after a stalemate with Chile, he missed the target in the penalty shootout. Sergio Aguero said he had never seen his team-mate and close friend so “broken” as in the dressing room afterwards.

Messi couldn’t take it anymore.

“For me, the national team is over,” he said after that Copa America final, holding back the tears. “I’ve done all I can. It’s been four finals; I tried. It was the thing I wanted the most, but I couldn’t get it. It’s very hard, but the decision is taken. There will be no going back.”

Barely five days later, Argentine newspaper La Nacion reported that Messi had had a change of heart. Rather than listen to those who insisted he could never do what Maradona had done, he was desperate to defy them and lead Argentina to glory.

He had felt he could no longer live with the burden of his nation’s hopes and dreams. But on reflection, he couldn’t live without it.