Mero: It's not just football
In the previous article "C Ronaldo's Business Empire", we unveiled the "president" C Ronaldo's own business empire opened up step by step: behind the world's most profitable players - decrypting Ronaldo's business empire
Like Cristiano Ronaldo, as the winner of the most Golden Ball Awards in history, Lionel Messi also runs a huge business network outside the football stadium, but Messi is slightly low-key off the field, so his business operation model and brand seem to be little known to football fans.
However, in fact, according to the statistics of the authoritative media "Forbes", Messi's total revenue reached 127 million US dollars in 2019, ranking first among global athletes, and although the income in these two years was not as good as Ronaldo, it was also closely followed, and it was one of the highest-paid athletes in the world.
All of this means that Messi, who is low-key and introverted and rarely shows his face, is actually a business master who "makes a fortune in a muffled voice".
Messi and C Ronaldo are not only striving for a higher status on the pitch, but also a role model for the entire football world in the commercial battlefield outside the football world.
Compared with Ronaldo's steady business style of starting from the clothing brand and gradually moving towards the service industry, the hotel industry and real estate, Messi's plan is completely opposite.
Massey's business investments began as hotel and real estate investments, and they were full of ideas with a strong sense of technology.
Hotels started with real estate businesses
Ronaldo set up his personal brand CR7 in 2013, operating a clothing business, after 3 years of development, in 2016, Ronaldo cooperated with the Portuguese Pestana Group to establish a CR7 hotel chain.
Macy's business started late, but it started as soon as it started – in 2017, Macy set up the hotel chain MiM (Majestic i Messi), and bought a four-star hotel in Barcelona's seaside resort for £26 million, the first MiM hotel and the first step in the macy hotel business.
Messi's hotels are located in resorts or ski slopes, which reflects Messi's positioning as a high-end tourist hotel.
After Sitges, Messi opened five of his own hotel chains in the tourist areas of Baquila, Mallorca, Ibiza, Andorra and Cádiz.
MiM hotel in Andorra on Charlemagne Street
However, the road is thorny and tortuous, and it is impossible to be smooth. In December 2021, the MiM Hotel in Sitges was warned by the local government for alleged illegal construction and will even be demolished.
It turned out that Sanchez, the former owner of the hotel, hid the illegal construction when selling the hotel.
In addition, the latest MiM hotel in Cadiz also has a disadvantage: the Messi team fired all the old employees after buying the hotel, which caused a huge storm and protest.
Despite some controversy, it has to be admitted that Macy's hotel business has been very successful, with several hotels being praised for their comfortable and quiet living environments and integrated into the tourist meccas in which they are located due to their unique design.
In addition to the hotel business, Messi has also dabbled in real estate investments, and he has worked in a number of mansions in Barcelona and his hometown of Rosario.
However, it is obviously not enough to limit his vision to these "commodity" investments, and Messi, who has endorsed companies such as Adidas, PepsiCo, Gillette, Turkish Airlines, Samsung, Gatorade, Huawei, Budweiser, MasterCard, Jacob & Co, etc., certainly hopes to use his fame more fully.
In 2019, Messi partnered with tomay Hilfiger, a well-known clothing company, to release his own branded clothing M10 at the Santa Eulalia clothing store on Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona, including T-shirts, shirts, jackets, pants, shoes, suits, designed by Ginny, the sister of Tommy Hilfiger's creative director, with Messi's sister Maria as the brand general manager, officially competing with Ronaldo's CR7 clothing.
Messi works as an M10 clothing model
3. Big Ideas and Cryptocurrencies
The above industries are similar to the business operations of Messi and C Ronaldo, and Messi's special feature lies in his high-tech creativity.
In 2017, Messi came to Visit China, and then announced that he would cooperate with several companies in China and Spain to build "The Messi Experience Park" in Nanjing, China, a park with an investment of more than 170 million yuan, which will have 46,000 square meters of indoor facilities, 12,000 square meters of outdoor play area and 25,000 square meters of public space, as well as high-tech equipment such as robot live performances, VR, and AR.
Sports theme parks are a new thing, and in 2014, the Barcelona municipal government invested 20 million euros in the Monvik Stadium to build the "Open Camp Barcelona" as the "world's first sports theme park".
But in fact, Ferrari World AduDhabi, which opened in 2010, was earlier, but compared to Abu Dhabi Ferrari World, which is full of various racing cultures such as game equipment, the Barcelona Open Camp is more pure in sports.
The bold and huge investment in this emerging industry shows Messi's creativity and boldness.
Ferrari World Abu Dhabi
Speaking at the theme park launch, Messi said: "I want to give visitors an experience they have never had before, to encourage them to join the sport earlier, and I want them to feel like I'm right next to them when they tour." Messi's plan is to make it the best football theme park in the world, and the operation team even played the slogan of "challenging Shanghai Disneyland".
Unfortunately, the park was scheduled to be completed in 2019 and open in early 2020, but although five years have passed, the theme park has not made much progress, and most of the ideas and designs are only in the concept stage.
When will Messi's vision come true? When will the fans' expectations come true? No one can say for sure. After all, the road to entrepreneurship is not smooth, but full of difficulties and obstacles, especially in such a large investment of emerging industries.
Macy Park concept map
Messi has also dabbled in cryptocurrency and NFT investments.
In fact, as early as 2017, Messi served as the ambassador of the Israeli company Sirin Labs, and the main gathering point of this company lies in cryptocurrencies, blockchain and other technologies, which may be Messi's earliest connection with cryptocurrencies.
Paris Saint-Germain issued a virtual fan token in January 2020, $PSG, as a way for fans to interact with the club, and when Messi's name began to associate with Paris in the summer window of 2021, a $PSG bidding war broke out on August 10, and the actual price of this virtual currency more than doubled.
Later, in the Paris-Messi contract, the fee paid by Paris to Messi also included a large amount of $PSG tokens. The use of cryptocurrencies as a way to pay players' commissions is avant-garde all over the world.
In 2021, Messi also partnered with the blockchain platform (Ethernity Chain) to develop an exclusive NFT series of works – The Massiversa, designed by digital designer Boss Logic, with a total of four works: "The Golden One", "The Man From Tomorrow", "The Man of The Past" and "The King Piece". Prices range from $50 to $10,000.
In March 2022, Messi signed a more than $20 million agreement with fan token company Socios.com to serve as its global ambassador to help it promote a sports-themed cryptocurrency.
4. Achievements are not only in football
Messi has his own philanthropic foundation, the Leo Messi Foundation, founded in 2007, which collaborates with the Barça Foundation on various programs with a particular focus on pediatric disability research.
They are involved in a children's cancer research project with the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, and the two foundations have also supported the construction of the new Sant Joan de Déu Pediatric Cancer Center.
Messi himself is an ambassador for UNICEF and has funded a 324-square-metre children's park in Barcelona's Waldsibrunn Hospital.
This may be because Messi's illness in his youth affected his life.
Little Messi had just learned to walk when he encountered an accident, when he was 10 months old, he ran to the road to find his father and two brothers, fell and fell, causing a fracture of the ulna bone.
Later, Messi was diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency, only 127 cm tall at the age of 9 and a half, and the treatment of this disease required daily injections of growth hormone, with an annual medical fee of 12,000 euros, and the maximum treatment period was 6 years.
Messi's father, Jorge
Although Messi's father, Jorge, was the head of a steel company in Rosario, such a huge expense was still a huge burden.
Both Medicare and Steel Society refused to pay for the full treatment over two years, and Messi's parent team, the Newells old guys, squeezed toothpaste every time they paid.
In order to treat the disease, the Messi family contacted the Argentine giant River Plate, and although River Plate saw that Messi was talented, he was unwilling to pay Newells's contract cancellation fee.
Reluctantly, Messi's family traveled to Spain in search of opportunities, and finally Barca's football adviser Lexach made a desperate bet, and after spending a lot of time to overcome public opinion, he persuaded other senior executives within the Barca club to write a signing guarantee for Messi on a napkin, which changed Messi's life.
As a result, shortly after entering Barca, Messi suffered a serious injury from a ruptured fibula in his left leg, and he had to recuperate for two months after playing in the juvenile B league, and finally passed the difficulty of entering Barca for the first time.
It should be said that Messi is very lucky.
Although he was seriously ill and unable to see a doctor, he was changed by his extraordinary football talent and the discovery of Bole Rexach.
What about sick children who are not so gifted? What about children who have some special talents but are not discovered by Bó Lè? Messi took them into account, which was the original intention of the Messi Foundation.
Just as C Ronaldo lived poorly from childhood and therefore used his fame to create income for his hometown after growing into a superstar, Messi also did not forget the life path he took step by step after becoming rich, in this regard, Messi and C Ronaldo are common.
Messi's business projects are full of unknowns and adventures, and many of his investment projects are rare in the commercial operations of the entire sports world.
However, Messi himself is very low-key, trying his best to put all business affairs in a controllable private area, and does not actively show anything. As a result, we rarely get a good picture of Messi's earnings off the field.
As a great footballer, Messi took everything to the extreme.
As a businessman, Messi is also worth learning.
Be a low-key person and do things vigorously. This is Messi, worthy of the appreciation and respect of every football lover.