Recovering from the pandemic and coping with the stringent national security law imposed by Beijing after the 2019 unrest, Hong Kong wants to restore its former economic glory, but its status as an international metropolis is further shaken by Messi’s shocking no-show in Inter Miami’s local friendly. Messi, authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong claim, has embarrassed the city. They are wrong. Instead, it is exactly these dim-witted, hot-headed nationalist handlers of the Messi mess who have torn the city’s image. Their aggressive ideological face-saving campaign to demonise the Argentine star and his club is only adding fuel to the fire that Hong Kong’s economy and reputation face.

No doubt, Inter Miami’s trip to Hong Kong is a complete PR debacle. It is undeniable the MLS side rose to global prominence not by their performance, which had brought them to the bottom of the US league prior to Messi’s arrival last summer, but by the individual prominences of their players—Messi and his former teammates at Barcelona: Busquets, Alba, and Suárez—and president, David Beckham. Anticipation for the return of Messi and this once-dominant quartet he had led led to the rapid sell-out of tickets of Inter Miami’s friendly against a select Hong Kong XI, despite them being the most aggressively priced throughout the club’s pre-season tour. The 40,000-strong audience was, anticlimactically, greeted with a squad without Messi and Suárez. Expectedly, the game concluded with endless boos at Beckham and the pinks.

It is, however, not only the fans who have taken offence. The Hong Kong government is especially irritated, not least because of its extensive participation in and endorsement of the ‘game of the decade’, including a generous financial support of 16 million Hong Kong dollars (1.6 million pounds). Messi and Suárez’s participation in Inter Miami’s subsequent game against Japanese winners Vissel Kobe certainly did not help in the eyes of the city’s Chinese nationalist authorities and their overlords in Beijing. Let us look at some select comments on the affair from them. The Hong Kong legislator Junius Ho, on Facebook, condemned the ‘immorality’ of Messi, Beckham, and Tatler Asia (a luxury magazine which organised the friendly), calling for ‘revenge’. In another post, he identified Messi’s no-show to be ‘geopolitically charged’, ‘anti-Chinese’ (citing his vigour in Japan), and ‘calculated to insult and humiliate the Hong Kong government’. His colleague, the representative from the sports constituency Kenneth Fok, in a milder tone, criticised the ‘money-mindedness’ of Beckham’s side, demanding an apology. Messi’s apparent avoidance of government officials throughout his trip caught the attention of the state newspaper Ta Kung Pao, which published an op-ed that read, ‘On the one hand were Chinese officials sanctioned by the US, on the other hand a US-based football star; such an avoidance was so odd and rare that deliberations and instructions must have been made.’ The city’s former security chief Regina Ip put it straightforwardly on X/Twitter: ‘Hong Kong people hate Messi, Inter-Miami, and the black hand behind them, for the deliberate and calculated snub to Hong Kong… Messi should never be allowed to return to Hong Kong. His lies and hypocrisy are disgusting.’ In Beijing, the state newspaper Global Times speculated the no-show to be ‘politically motivated’, a ‘deliberate move of external forces to humiliate Hong Kong’. ‘Shame on Messi, Inter Miami, and Tatler’, the editorial concluded. In retaliation, the Chinese Football Association allegedly revoked its invitation to the Argentine national team for a trip to China in March. What had been a simple football friendly was hastily elevated to a matter of national struggle.

But the reality is: fans’ boos were natural; authorities’ boos were thoughtless. Indeed, the entire episode of extensive governmental engagement in and identification with the match was unsolicited—at least for Inter Miami and the fans. We saw the city’s chief executive, sports secretary, and even veteran political leaders attend the match jubilantly, but did we see the same in Tokyo? Let us not forget the commercial nature of the match: Tatler Asia, Beckham, and Messi were all in for the cash (even Colonel Sanders was in for the cash as the price of a Bucket Combo at the stadium skyrocketed to HK$580, or £58). Fok was right in pointing out the money-mindedness of Inter Miami, but—admit it—it is not something to lambast at a football club and, in fact, any business entity (imagine how absurd it is to compliment Barcelona for their money-mindlessness). The real story is: Hong Kong leaders thought it would be a great idea to politicise the event and use the World Cup winner to revamp the city’s declining image in the international community whilst tittytaining the city’s discontent population. When things did not unfold as intended, panicked and lost, they knew only outcry.

Why did things go wrong? Hong Kong and Beijing, overwhelmed by the ever-surging nationalism, could only seek explanation in geopolitics. After all, Inter Miami is American, Beckham is British, the other owner of the club, the Mas family, are Cuban dissidents, Messi is white with European connections, and their next match happened in Japan. I cannot preclude any possibility, but such a possibility is low, even lower than Inter Miami’s official excuse that Messi and Suárez sustained injuries in Hong Kong which recovered in Tokyo. The reason is obvious: Messi and Beckham, just like many other football stars, had always welcomed sportswashing performances for US ideological adversaries and authoritarian regimes whose deeds are incompatible with mainstream Western values, as long as the pay is tempting enough. The Saudis understand this well: following their successful Cristiano Ronaldo stunt, Messi was offered a 22.5 million euro (£19.2 million) contract to promote tourism in the kingdom, which he gladly accepted. Beckham has a similar contract with Qatar, an absolute monarchy charged with LGBTQ+ rights violations. Going back in time, Messi was allegedly paid £2.5 million by Gabon to appear in President Ali Bongo’s PR show prior to the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations which Gabon hosted; the notorious Bongo faced numerous human rights accusations, including negligence of ritual murders of children. Messi and Beckham are accustomed to working with regimes that the US disapproves of. They had no reason to embarrass China, should they be paid sufficiently. Have Chinese authorities forgotten that Messi is currently a spokesperson for various Chinese brands from Mengniu (we all remember the 2018 World Cup ad wherein the smiling Argentine held Mengniu milk in one hand and a thumbs up in the other) to the geopolitically troubled Huawei?

There have been in circulation many other more convincing speculations about what really caused the no-show. I do not wish to delve into them, for this is not a piece of investigative journalism. The truth remains and is likely to remain uncertain, although it is hugely likely that the pay was relevant. What is certain, however, is the immense naïveté of the overreacting authorities of Hong Kong and, surprisingly, Beijing. If they have to step up and direct the blame (which is, as I have stressed, unnecessary and unsolicited, but which nonetheless does not hurt per se), the most rational target is Tatler Asia, which, as organiser, must bear some, if not most, responsibility for the disaster no matter what the truth was. Latching onto nationalist rhetoric and designating Inter Miami, Beckham, Messi, and even the Argentina national team as enemies of the nation is the most unwise decision the authorities could have taken. Not only does it hurt, it kills. Who dares to do business in China, including Hong Kong, where a non-political error is easily politicised, elevated to the altitude of national humiliation, and responded with the magnitude of national censure and revenge? Geopolitical risks may have been balanced out and even outweighed by lucrative gains, yet one must wonder how lucrative must the gains be for business to be worth it when the former is simply so big now.

Kevin Rudd, the Australian ambassador to the US known for his faith in and goodwill to Beijing during his tenure as prime minister, prophesied in his doctoral thesis an intensified alignment of Chinese markets with ideological politics as Xi fuses and embraces Marxist economics, Leninist politics, and (hyper)nationalist sentiments. To these elements I add the Schmittian fetish of the political. The Messi mess appears to be yet another proof of the end of the relative market independence in China’s reforming era; more importantly, it signals the contagion of Xi’s ideological excesses to Hong Kong, long a comparatively free economy within the country. The health of Hong Kong’s economy is already unwell, as its stock market index sinks to where it was in 1997. ‘Hong Kong is over’, declared the former chair of Morgan Stanley Asia Stephen Roach yesterday on Financial Times, citing the influence of China’s economic and diplomatic problems. The death certificate Roach issued might have been an exaggerated rant, but the overflow of Chinese ideological politics to the legally self-governing city—in particular, the dominance of the political and the practice of politicising everything—is concrete and manifest, as the Messi mess has painfully taught. One is prompted to ask: is there still a need to make separate economic forecasts for Hong Kong and mainland China?