Why is the World Trying to Spoil Lionel Messi?

On financial and structural obstacles.

The first time I watched Lionel Messi play live, I barely saw him.

This was in 2008 and I wasn’t really into soccer, but I was in Buenos Aires and all of Buenos Aires was in El Monumental, so I figured what the hell. The match was a pretty typical South American World Cup qualifier, i.e. an eschatological event. Gabriel Heinze scored an own goal twelve minutes in. At the half hour mark Carlos Tévez drew a red for stomping on a dude’s shin, which the home fans felt was a show of affection in their culture. When Argentina tied the game in the second half, it was on a delicious Messi throughball to Sergio Agüero, but I didn’t know that. What I knew was some striped shirts were celebrating at the far end of the field and we — the whole stadium shared a pronoun — were charging the fence.

They say people will forget what you did but never how you made them feel. What Messi made me feel was that something I didn’t fully understand had happened with a ball and now the world was imploding around me. I felt ecstatic whichever way you want: like a kid in a club, like a saint on a cathedral wall.

I’ve watched damn near every minute of his career since then and that pattern never really changes. Messi does something with the ball that my brain can’t process. The world implodes all over again. Except that over the years the implosion has spilled out of the stadium, off of the screen, and into, well, everything. It’s like the universe saw him folding defenders into Möbius strips and decided all bets were off.

The week after the Argentina game, Lehman Brothers collapsed. I remember reading about it on a hostel computer after a night of partying, trying to wrap my cottony head around why we all had to care about banks now. That probably should’ve been the first warning.

For every beautiful thing Messi has done since then, money has been working to undo it. His club put Qatar’s name on his chest to get more money; they spent the money so we could watch him play with Neymar, then Qatar spent even more money so we couldn’t. Barcelona spent that money on every expensive player they could find to pummel the sport into financial submission, only for the financialized sport to spend the next four years pummeling them. The Super League was born and then it wasn’t, except Barcelona still sort of pretended that it was, and all of this stupidity was happening because of money. There’s been so much of it in the way sometimes it’s hard to see the field.

If what Barcelona said tonight was true and Messi is leaving the club, it’ll be because of money. If it turns out to have been a lie calculated to piss billions of people off at La Liga, well, you can guess why that was, too. The second global financial disaster of Messi’s playing career — because the world is imploding, remember — has Barcelona on the ropes.

His club’s accounts are just one of many systems collapsing around Messi while he plays. The country he used to wear on his shirt bought the World Cup and nearly brought down FIFA. The bribe money they bought it with came from cooking the planet alive. FIFA’s self-appointed prosecutor, the most powerful country on Earth, is busy tearing itself apart. There’s a global pandemic (still). Daft Punk broke up. People are super into NFTs for some reason. Shit’s bad, man.

Whether or not he winds up leaving Barcelona, Messi’s career will be forever scarred by what Barça’s press release called “financial and structural obstacles.” Really we’re all scarred by them — he just happens to exist in the same world as the rest of us. But I’m grateful that he does. Because if you tune it all out for 90 minutes and peer down at those tiny men at the far end of the field, you’ll see one of them do things with a ball that you don’t understand. And in that moment, even as the world implodes around you, things might sort of almost make sense. ❧

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Image: Raphael, Head of an Apostle Surrounded by a Tongue of Fire and a Nimbus