Rather than chase Lionel Messi with a camera, this documentary gathers the people who watched him grow up and asks them to explain what they saw.
What is Messi about?
Director Álex de la Iglesia sets his subjects around a restaurant table rather than in a studio, and the format shapes everything that follows: teachers, coaches, childhood friends and Barça teammates sit alongside journalists, writers and figures from football history to trade stories rather than deliver polished talking points. Their recollections trace the arc from a boy who barely put the ball down, through the wrenching decision to leave Rosario for Barcelona, to the separation from his family that decision forced. Names that shaped the player's development thread through the conversation — Ronaldinho, Rijkaard, Rexach, Guardiola — not as a highlight reel but as the people who were actually there at each turn. Lionel Messi, Johan Cruijff, César Luis Menotti, Andrés Iniesta, Alejandro Sabella, Gerard Piqué, Javier Mascherano and Jorge Valdano all appear across the film's account of a career built in stages most fans only ever see in finished form.
About the cast
The film draws its voices from inside and around the sport: teammates like Andrés Iniesta, Gerard Piqué and Javier Mascherano, coaching figures such as Alejandro Sabella, and broader football authorities including Johan Cruijff and César Luis Menotti, each offering a different angle on the same subject.
Context & significance
Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia built his name on genre filmmaking before turning to this sports documentary, and that instinct for staging shows in his choice to let the film's structure come from conversation rather than match footage. The result sits closer to oral history than to a conventional career retrospective, built from the testimony of people who watched the subject before he became a household name rather than from commentary added after the fact.
Watching Messi on Ktime
Messi is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so the restaurant-table conversations at the heart of the film come through clearly for Farsi-speaking viewers. A K-Time account is needed to watch, and the film's page can be browsed without logging in first.