"Messi is protected by the Jewish lobby" — that quote, from an Algerian broadcaster after Argentina beat Algeria 3-0 at this year's World Cup, tells you everything about how far outside football Messi's image has travelled. And with Argentina facing Switzerland in Saturday's quarterfinal, those tensions aren't going anywhere.
Messi has spent most of his career conspicuously avoiding politics. No hot takes, no geopolitical statements, no Twitter wars. But a trail of appearances, endorsements, and controversies stretching back over a decade has made him — willingly or not — a figure at the centre of debates about Israel, Zionism, and the Middle East conflict.
A relationship built over years
It started quietly enough. In July 2013, Messi sent a goodwill message to Argentina's Maccabiah team before the "Jewish Olympics" in Israel. A month later, he was at the Western Wall on a Barcelona peace tour, meeting Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and Jerusalem's mayor, and hosting football clinics for Israeli and Palestinian children.
In 2016, Egyptian football officials called him "Jewish" and a "Zionist" — not as a compliment — after he donated boots to a charity there. By 2019, he was playing a friendly in Tel Aviv in front of a sold-out Bloomfield Stadium crowd that included Israel's president, scoring on a night that BDS protesters had tried to cancel. And in 2020, he signed a three-year deal as brand ambassador for OrCam, an Israeli assistive tech company — not his first Israeli commercial tie, either, having previously represented Tel Aviv-based Sirin Labs.
These aren't coincidences stacking up. They're a consistent pattern across twelve years.
October 7 and the moment that cut through everything
Nothing in Messi's political orbit hits quite like what happened at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. Ninety-year-old Esther Cunio, originally from Argentina, told a Hamas militant who had come to take her: "I'm from where Messi is from." It likely saved her life.
That story — a grandmother invoking football's biggest name to survive a terrorist attack — stripped away any abstraction. Messi's connection to this conflict stopped being a PR footnote and became something raw and human.
His own responses have been characteristically minimal. That's his way. But critics on both sides have filled the silence for him — Palestinian TikTok accounts urging Argentina to lose the World Cup, Algerian analysts citing shadowy lobbies, Israeli fans claiming him as one of their own.
For Argentina's World Cup odds, none of this touches the pitch. But the noise around the team has reached a volume that goes well beyond football, and with every Messi goal — including the hat-trick against Algeria that reignited this whole debate — it gets louder.
FIFA suspended Palestinian football official Jibril Rajoub for a year in 2018 after he called on fans to burn Messi jerseys over a planned friendly with Israel. A cancelled match, a geopolitical row, a year-long ban — and Messi barely said a word through any of it.
He doesn't need to. The story writes itself around him regardless.
