Argentina defender Nicolas Otamendi announced his retirement from international football on Thursday, bringing \u200bthe curtain down on a 17-year career \u200cduring which he won the 2022 World Cup and two Copa America titles.<\/p>\n
The 38-year-old centre back \u200bmade 139 appearances for his country and \u200bwas part of the squad that reached \u2060this year’s World Cup final in \u200bthe United States, in which the defending champions \u200bwere beaten 1-0 by Spain.<\/p>\n
“Today I have to write the most difficult words of my career,” Otamendi \u200bposted on Instagram. “As fate would have it, \u200bmy last match was a World Cup final. It wasn’t \u200cthe \u2060result we wanted, but I’m leaving with my head held high, knowing that this team gave it their all right up \u200bto the very \u200blast second.<\/p>\n
“Thank \u2060you, Argentina, for allowing me to fulfil the dream of becoming \u200ba world champion.”<\/p>\n
Otamendi recently joined Argentine \u200bgiants \u2060River Plate after ending a successful 16-year spell in Europe, where he played for Porto, \u2060Valencia, \u200bManchester City and Benfica.<\/p>\n
He \u200brepresented his country at four World Cups.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":36853,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-40503","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Otamendi recently joined Argentine \u200bgiants \u2060River Plate after ending a successful 16-year spell in Europe, where he played for Porto, \u2060Valencia, \u200bManchester City and Benfica.","published_date":"","news_description":"Otamendi recently joined Argentine \u200bgiants \u2060River Plate after ending a successful 16-year spell in Europe, where he played for Porto, \u2060Valencia, \u200bManchester City and Benfica.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40504,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40503\/revisions\/40504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=40503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}