Why Some People Hate Messi: The Power of Social Media Narratives

In December 2022, the whole planet celebrated Lionel Messi lifting the FIFA World Cup. This summer, however, everyone seems to be calling him a cheat and a villain — well, mostly people who never watch football and teenagers.

I have watched football my whole life, so this is a sensitive topic for me. I know what it takes to shift public opinion and what the work looks like from the inside.

This article is a breakdown of how these campaigns start, how they spread, why they work on the human brain, and why the next one will move much faster.

Stage One: The Flip

Four years ago, almost the entire football world wanted Messi to win the World Cup. When he finally did, it felt like the perfect ending to one of the greatest careers the sport has ever seen.

Four years later, social media has somehow turned him into the villain.

Between then and now, almost nothing on the pitch has really changed. The officiating is largely the same, the squad consists mostly of the same players, and Messi is still the same player, playing the same football. Almost every variable has remained constant, yet public opinion has completely flipped.

The only thing that has really changed is the distribution layer: the algorithms behind Instagram and TikTok, and whatever those algorithms have determined will generate more engagement this cycle — Messi as a villain rather than Messi as a legend.

Stage Two: How a Campaign Starts

These campaigns rarely begin with an outright lie. They usually start with something real.

It could be a foul with the buildup deliberately cut out, a referee’s decision shown without the replay that explains it, or a clip that is technically accurate but missing just enough context to tell a completely different story.

Then the algorithm takes over.

Thousands of versions compete for attention. The ones that generate the most engagement survive, while everything else disappears. Over time, the surviving clips stop feeling like isolated moments and begin turning into talking points. Eventually, they become what people call “common knowledge.”

My friends who could not name a single midfielder suddenly started hating Messi around the same time.

One MIT study examined around 126,000 claims shared by roughly three million people on Twitter over an eleven-year period. Across every category they studied, false stories spread farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than true ones. On average, the truth took about six times longer to reach 1,500 people, while falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted.

It is not difficult to understand why. Outrage, conflict and surprise are simply better at capturing attention than accuracy.

Stage Three: The Paid Layer

A lot of what appears to be organic fan content is not necessarily organic.

I am obviously not going to make allegations about who may be funding the current wave. However, something similar has already happened to this exact player, and it even resulted in a police raid.

Meta, meanwhile, has been publishing quarterly reports on coordinated inauthentic behaviour since 2017, removing tens of thousands of fake accounts, pages and groups at a time. Researchers have also recently mapped a single operation involving nearly 1,500 fake accounts across Facebook and X.

From doing this professionally, I can tell you that coordinated narrative campaigns are a normal and often boring line item. They involve content calendars, editing teams, creator networks and seeded talking points.

This is how products are launched, how tokens are promoted, and how reputations are built or destroyed.

Sport was never exempt.

Stage Four: Why It Works on Your Brain

Back in 1922, Walter Lippmann argued in Public Opinion that people do not respond directly to reality. Instead, they respond to the “pictures in their heads.”

He was writing about newspapers.

Today, those pictures can be fifteen-second clips selected and delivered by algorithms.

Psychologists refer to part of this as the illusory truth effect, one of the most consistently replicated findings in psychology. Studies have shown that simply seeing a claim once can make people more likely to judge it as true later, even when the claim is false.

The effect can last for days, survive fact-check labels, and even appear when the claim contradicts something people already know.

That is why these campaigns do not rely on a single viral edit. One clip rarely changes someone’s mind. But dozens of similar clips, repeated over days or weeks, slowly become familiar.

Eventually, they stop feeling like something you were told and start feeling like something you have always believed.

That is what makes them so effective.

Stage Five: The Control Group

Football is one of the few things that is almost perfectly documented.

There are decades of matches, interviews and clips available online. Almost every claim people make can be checked in under a minute.

And yet, the narrative can still beat the evidence.

That is what makes this so interesting.

If public opinion can shift so dramatically around arguably the most documented footballer in history, imagine how much easier it becomes in areas where most people cannot verify information for themselves.

Politics. Wars. Markets. Health.

In those situations, people are often forced to rely on someone else’s version of events.

Stage Six: The Acceleration

Everything described above used to be expensive.

Running a narrative at scale required studios, editors, media buying and distribution relationships. That is why this playbook was once largely associated with governments and major corporations.

That constraint is now disappearing.

NewsGuard counted 49 AI-generated news sites in May 2023. By December, that number had risen to 614. Today, it tracks more than 3,000 AI content farms, with hundreds more appearing every month.

Now imagine applying the same playbook in a world where convincing edits cost almost nothing to produce.

What once took years can now happen in weeks, and soon, perhaps, in days.

I am not worried about Messi at all. He will be fine. He has every trophy that matters and two decades of footage behind him.

What worries me is everything else.

If the internet can reshape the reputation of arguably the most documented footballer in history, imagine what it can do in situations where there are not twenty years of footage available for people to check.

Politics. Wars. Business. Or even people you have never heard of.

In those cases, the narrative often becomes the only version of events that most people will ever see.

And that is the real danger.