Donald Trump, while fantasizing about turning the ruins of Gaza into luxury tourist resorts and planning who should govern an Iran under his bombs, allows himself the luxury of debating whether Messi is superior to Pelé.
The presence of Messi and Inter Miami at the White House was not an inevitable protocol act. It was an injection of symbolic capital for a leader who devours the image of others to feed his own mythomania. One must wonder what the thousands of immigrants pursued and deported without mercy by ICE must have felt upon seeing the Argentine star smiling and shaking hands with the executioner of their rights.
Messi, with his attendance, validated a spectacle he could have avoided with the same coldness with which he rejected Joe Biden's invitation in January 2025 to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. If he could be absent then, his presence now admits only one reading: connivance, validation, and agreement.
I would add: disgust, shame, rage, and rot.
The double standard of the business
The comparison leaves Messi in a dark place. In 2019, Megan Rapinoe and the US women's national team snubbed Trump after winning the World Cup. The president labeled them «left-wing maniacs», but for Messi, he offered the praise of a fanatic. The Argentine captain, who usually leaves his rivals exposed on the pitch, was caught this time in a moral «offside» from which it is difficult to emerge unscathed. Whether by conviction or due to the obligations of a World Cup that reeks of corruption, his figure became linked to a person of infected morality.
Meanwhile, Infantino's FIFA continues to rub its hands with the revenue, ignoring that the world burns under missiles that tear children apart in Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran. There is an unbearable double standard: Russia was sanctioned for Ukraine, yet the red carpet remains for an empire that has turned the planet into an unbreathable place. The infrastructure of Mexico or Canada would be a sufficient alternative for a World Cup that should not be stained with the blood of military operations like «Epic Fury», where schools are turned into rubble.
Trump and Netanyahu are real threats to global stability. Messi, a figure with incalculable reach, chose a photo that no one forced him to take. It is difficult not to compare him with Maradona, who did not hesitate to decline the invitation of Charles of England to visit Buckingham Palace. «His hands are stained with blood», he said. Diego knew where he should not be. Messi, instead, has preferred to smile and joke in the Oval Office and gift his jersey to Donald Trump. He should limit himself to leading on the field and avoid becoming the advertising shield for a system that suffocates the world.
As the great Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature, said: «Everything I know most surely about the morality and obligations of men, I learned from football».
Go home, Messi.
By Max Nitrofoska
