A 13-year-old Lionel Messi once gave a Q&A interview while he was still playing for the youth teams at Newell’s Old Boys. Speaking to Diario La Capital, a local newspaper in Rosario, he revealed that if he could eat any meal, it would be pollo con salsa (chicken). If he could date any model, it would be Argentine television personality Nicole Neumann. If he could watch any film, it would be 1994 adventure comedy Baby’s Day Out. And if he could do any job, he would be a PE teacher.
Earlier this week, a grainy scanned copy of that interview went semi-viral across social media. You might have seen it, in fact. The story was picked up by several news websites and content platforms. It was one of the most “upvoted” posts on the r/soccer subreddit, no less. It was shared and reshared, ripped and aggregated, recycled and regurgitated until we had all had our fill of it, in the way that every new and previously undetected morsel about Messi is.
