So, I’ve been meaning to track these guys down for ages. You know how it is—you’re watching some highlights, maybe the old 2014 World Cup final against Germany pops up on YouTube, and suddenly you feel old. You start thinking, “Man, that was ten years ago. What happened to Rojo? Is Lavezzi still kicking a ball somewhere?”
I didn’t just casually Google it. If I’m going to document this, I’m doing it right. I started the practice by pulling the official 23-man roster. Not just the big names, but everyone, from the first choice keeper down to the third-string left-back who never saw the pitch. I literally dug out the old FIFA squad list. That was step one.
The Messy Process of Tracking Down Ghosts
The whole thing turned into a massive digital scavenger hunt. I opened about thirty tabs and just started working through the list alphabetically, ticking names off one by one. I quickly confirmed the status of the obvious guys—Messi is still playing, Di Maria is winding down in Portugal, Mascherano retired years ago and moved into coaching. Easy.
The real labor started with the guys who weren’t world-class superstars. What about the defenders? I spent a solid three hours just on the backline. Trying to confirm the current club status of guys like José Basanta and Hugo Campagnaro was brutal. Transfermarkt is okay, but often lists them as “retired since 2020,” which doesn’t tell you what they are actually doing now—are they coaching, running a restaurant, or just on the golf course?
I had to cross-reference statements from obscure Argentinian sports news sites, sometimes running Spanish articles through a clunky translator just to figure out if someone was appointed manager of a youth team or just showed up for a friendly match. I had conflicting reports about Agustín Orión for ages. One site claimed he was a youth coordinator; another implied he was completely out of the game. I finally nailed down that he’s doing some private business consulting now, totally outside football. That felt like a massive win, just confirming one guy’s post-career pivot.
I compiled the results into three main categories, because listing 23 players with full bios would take forever, and frankly, my head was spinning:
- Still Professional: Guys still playing top-flight or high-level soccer (e.g., Messi, Di Maria, Romero).
- Amateur/Lower League/Obscure: Guys still playing for fun or in leagues nobody watches (This list was surprisingly small, most either retired fully or kept a high profile).
- Fully Retired/Post-Career: The largest group—coaching, punditry, or doing civilian jobs (e.g., Mascherano, Zabaleta, Gago).
The surprising thing was how many of them slid straight into coaching roles. Gago, Demichelis, Mascherano—they didn’t waste any time. It shows you the focus these guys have. They finish playing on Saturday and they’re managing a team by Monday.
Why Did I Dive Into This Rabbit Hole Right Now?
Now, why did I put in a full day tracking these specific players? It’s kind of a stupid, personal story, but bear with me. About six months ago, I was having dinner with my wife, and we were talking about how fast our savings account was shrinking. We’re both working hard, but damn, inflation hits hard. We were joking about how back in 2014, when we were fresh out of college, we thought we had it all figured out.
That 2014 World Cup was the backdrop to that whole summer. I remember skipping work to watch the semifinals, and I was so invested in that Argentina team because my old college roommate, Dave, was obsessed with them. We used to argue constantly about Lavezzi vs. Higuain starting. We were inseparable back then.
Fast forward ten years. Dave and I haven’t really talked since he moved for a job overseas. We send the occasional generic holiday text, but that deep friendship just drifted away, buried under mortgages and careers. It just clicked for me—the 2014 Argentina squad felt like a physical marker of that lost time, that lost version of my own life.
So, tracking down these players, confirming their status, seeing which ones were still successful and which ones had quietly disappeared, it wasn’t really about football. It was my weird way of checking in on the past decade of my own life. I needed to catalog their current status to feel like I was closing a specific chapter in my head, the chapter where everything was still 2014 simple. I just needed to know if they were still fighting, or if they had also quietly settled down.
I spent maybe eight or nine hours grinding through this research. The final outcome is a comprehensive list I now have sitting on my hard drive—a bizarre piece of personal historical documentation. It was exhausting, but it provided a strange kind of closure, realizing that just like me, those world-class athletes are also just trying to figure out what comes next after the big event is over.