There are few more absurd ways to measure a footballer's importance than watching an entire city adjust its airports in case he shows up. Dallas did exactly that. The possibility of Lionel Messi playing there with Argentina sent projections soaring to the point where the Texan city planned improvements to terminals and hotels to absorb between 200,000 and one million additional visitors. Not because of the World Cup in the abstract. Because of a left-footed man who, by the time the tournament kicks off, will already be showing his sporting grey hairs.
The thesis is uncomfortable for purists and delightful for accountants. Messi stopped being a player and became a financial asset with legs. Estimates around the 2026 World Cup spoke of a multibillion-dollar impact on global GDP, and within that mountain of money there is a portion that depends not on football as a sport but on a single proper noun. In Dallas, the figures pointed to a local impact of between 1.5 and 2.1 billion dollars tied to Argentina's matches. That is the number that evaporates if the genius does not show up.
What makes this fascinating is that it breaks the historical logic of how World Cup myths are built. Pelé was champion in three of his four Cups, Maradona lifted the 1986 trophy, but both consolidated their legendary status mainly after hanging up their boots, having played in two to four tournaments. The legend arrived with nostalgia. Messi reversed the order. If he makes it to the 2026 tournament, he will have six World Cup appearances to his name, something never seen before, and he will do so with the cachet of a living myth while still deciding matches. Cristiano walks the same tightrope, brushing against the 40-year barrier with another World Cup in his sights. Two men who keep defining economic scenarios at an age when others are already sitting in television studios.
The crux of the matter is why this is not obvious. Anyone would say a star player moves tickets. But the Messi case scales to another dimension when you look at what happened since his arrival in Miami. One study placed Inter Miami's valuation at 1.45 billion dollars in 2025, up 22 percent on the previous year. Apple, which took a gamble with the MLS Season Pass, saw its subscriber base grow driven by interest in watching the Argentine. The league broke attendance records with more than 11 million viewers in the regular season, and no one in the industry hesitated to christen the phenomenon the Messi effect. This is not team marketing. It is one man rewriting the balance sheet of an entire competition.
Brands understood it before anyone else. Michelob ULTRA launched a global spot with Messi as the lead, betting millions on placing his face next to the brewer's logo in the most expensive advertising windows in the world. That is the valuation the advertising market puts on a face, not on a dribble. When a corporation signs those cheques, it is buying guaranteed attention, and attention is the only currency that truly matters in the World Cup business.
And attention has a metric that makes the hair stand on end. In the Argentina–Croatia match at Qatar 2022, audience data showed a jump among child and teenage viewers at the exact moment Messi stepped onto the pitch. Not when the match started. When he came on. Children and adolescents, the audience advertisers pursue desperately because they define the next two decades of consumption, were switching on their screens for one specific person. Measurement consultancies projected that the 2026 World Cup would break television audience records across the Americas, with growth in viewing time, and a large part of that expectation hangs on the same peg.
Add tourism to the equation. The United States was facing a projected drop in foreign visitors for 2025, and the tournament appeared as the remedy to reverse it, with hundreds of thousands of fans willing to cross borders. Many of them following, yes, the same man as always. Dallas did not plan to expand its airports out of love for the sport. It did so because someone ran the numbers and the numbers had a name and a surname.
Honesty demands acknowledging the strongest objection here. Messi is not the only star on the bill, nor does the World Cup collapse without him. Spain's Lamine Yamal, at 17, and Norway's Erling Haaland, at 23, arrived with market valuations of 200 million euros each according to market estimates, and audience analysts pointed to them alongside Neymar as engines for hooking new generations. Market measurements suggested that names like Messi, Cristiano, Neymar, Yamal and Haaland could broaden younger audiences' interest in the 2026 tournament. Mbappé remained relevant and will be only 27. The succession exists and is pushing forward.
But none of them yet combines what Messi does. Planetary status plus longevity plus active myth. Yamal is a promise, not a certainty. Haaland scores goals for fun but does not move a country to plan airport infrastructure. Mbappé still carries the weight of the major titles he has yet to win. Bloomberg said it without anaesthetic, warning that without Messi the hopes of a greater economic impact in Dallas would be affected. The shortfall would touch ticket sales, merchandise and the fan tourism that inflates local accounts. At the global level, television and sponsors would notice some loss of pull.
Organisers respond with the diversification card. They trust that Haaland, Yamal or Ronaldo himself will partially offset the dip in Argentine interest, and that the younger figures will become magnets for incoming fans. It is a sensible bet on a spreadsheet. But partially offsetting is not the same as substituting. The reduction will hit the most lucrative indicators: premium tickets, advertising spend, shirts that sell out within hours. And those are precisely the ones that generate margin.
The World Cup's reach is so enormous that it will survive any retirement. An economic impact running to tens of billions of dollars does not rest on a single ankle. The event is a machine that grinds records regardless of genius. What will change is the premium, that surcharge a specific name adds to every ticket, every advertisement, every subscription. Messi turned that premium into something measurable, almost brazen, and that is why his departure will leave a visible scar on the balance sheets even if the body of the event remains healthy.
What remains is the final move of an irreplaceable asset. When a 38-year-old man appears in the urban planning documents of a city in Texas, football has already stopped being just football and started trading. The question is not how much Messi is worth. It is what the market will do on the day there is no longer anyone whose step onto the pitch instantly spikes the children's ratings.
