In December 2022, the whole planet celebrated Messi lifting the World Cup. This summer, everyone is calling him a cheat and a villain (well, mostly people who never watch football and teenagers).
I’ve watched football my whole life (so this is a sensitive topic to me), and I shape narratives for a living. Marketing, positioning, making people feel things about things. i know what it costs to move public opinion, what the work looks like from the inside. This article is a breakdown: how these campaigns start, how they spread, why they work on your brain, and why the next one will run 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 really changed. The officiating is largely the same, the squad is mostly the same players, and Messi is still the same guy playing the same football. Almost every variable stayed constant, yet public opinion completely flipped.
The only thing that really changed was the distribution layer: the algorithms behind Instagram and TikTok, and whatever decided that Messi-as-villain edits perform better this cycle than Messi-as-legend edits did last time.
Stage two: How a campaign starts
These things rarely start with an outright lie. They usually start with something real: a foul with the buildup cut out. A referee decision without the replay that explains it. A technically accurate clip, 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 get the most engagement survive, and everything else disappears. After a while, the surviving clips stop feeling like isolated moments and start becoming talking points. Eventually, they become “common knowledge”.
My friends who couldn’t name a single midfielder suddenly hated Messi around the same time.
One MIT study looked at around 126,000 claims shared by roughly 3 million people on Twitter over eleven years. 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’s not hard to see why. Outrage, conflict and surprise are simply better at capturing attention than accuracy.
Stage three: The paid layer
A lot of what looks like organic fan content isn’t actually organic.
I’m obviously not going to make allegations about who funds the current wave, but something similar already happened to this exact player, and there was a police raid about it:
On the other hand, meta has been publishing quarterly takedown reports on coordinated inauthentic behavior since 2017, removing tens of thousands of fake accounts, pages and groups at a time, and researchers recently mapped a single operation running nearly 1,500 fake accounts across facebook and x. from doing this professionally i can tell you coordinated narrative campaigns are a normal, boring line item: content calendars, editing teams, creator networks, seeded talking points. This is how products launch, how tokens pump, how reputations get built and unbuilt. Sport was never exempt.
Stage four: Why it works on your brain
Back in 1922, Walter Lippmann argued in Public Opinion that people don’t respond directly to reality. They respond to the “pictures in their heads.” he was writing about newspapers. Today those pictures are fifteen-second clips selected by algorithms.
Psychologists call part of this the illusory truth effect, one of the most consistently replicated findings in psychology. Studies have shown that simply seeing a claim once makes people more likely to judge it as true later, even if it’s false. The effect can last for days, survives fact-check labels, and shows up even when the claim contradicts something people already know.
That’s why these campaigns don’t rely on a single viral edit. One clip rarely changes anyone’s mind. 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 always believed. That’s what makes them so effective.
Stage five: The control group
Football is one of the few things that’s almost perfectly documented. There are twenty years of matches, interviews and clips online. Almost every claim people make can be checked in under a minute.
And yet, the narrative still beats the evidence.
That’s what makes it so interesting. If public opinion can shift this dramatically around arguably the most documented footballer in history, imagine how much easier it is in areas where most people can’t verify anything for themselves. politics, wars, markets, even health. In those cases, you’re usually relying on someone else’s version of events.
Stage Six: The acceleration
everything above used to be expensive. running a narrative at scale meant studios, editors, media buys and distribution relationships. that’s why this playbook mostly belonged to governments and large corporations.
That constraint is disappearing.
NewsGuard counted 49 AI-generated news sites in May 2023. By December, there were 614. today they track more than 3,000 AI content farms, with hundreds more appearing every month.
Now imagine the same playbook in a world where convincing edits cost almost nothing to make.
What used to take years can now happen in weeks, and soon probably days.
Not worried about Messi at all. he’ll 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 isn’t twenty years of footage for people to check. politics, wars, business, or people you’ve never even heard of. in those cases, the narrative often becomes the only version most people ever see.
This was first posted on X by Rose at @therosieum
— rosie (@therosieum) July 20, 2026
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