Ronaldo Believes FIFA Favored Messi At The World Cup

Name: Ronaldo Believes FIFA Favored Messi At The World Cup
Uploaded: 2026-08-27T10:01:08+00:00
Duration: 18 min 26 s
Channel: Qatar Moments

00:00A single social media like from Cristiano Ronaldo has football fans talking again.

00:05He appeared to endorse a post-accusing FIFA of favoring Lionel Messi and Argentina at the World

00:10Cup. But once you see exactly what was written, you'll understand why this has exploded.

00:14The like that said everything. There was no press conference, no statement through a

00:19representative, no interview granted to a friendly outlet. There was only a small red

00:23heart appearing under a video on Instagram, and the name attached to that heart belonged

00:28to the most followed athlete on the planet. By around July 20, 2026, the screenshots were

00:33everywhere. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, group chats, and a dozen languages.

00:38They all showed the same thing. A reel posted by the Spanish television program Espigio

00:42Público, sitting on somewhere between 150,000 and 188,000 likes, and in the list of accounts

00:47that had engaged with it, the verified handle, Cristiano. In some versions of the screenshot,

00:52it was rendered in French. Aim par Cristiano.

00:55So Cristiano Ronaldo has just liked a post that is accusing FIFA and Argentina of corruption.

01:00That clip is not even from this tournament. That is a creator reacting to an earlier,

01:04near-identical incident involving Argentina's 2022 title, which tells you the habit has a track record.

01:10But the 2026 version landed differently because of what was actually being said in the video he endorsed.

01:16And the reel's Spanish journalist Pilar Rodriguez Losantos was not offering measured analysis.

01:21She described FIFA as un organismo mafios oi vergonzos, a mafia-like and shameful organization,

01:27and called it one of the most corrupt institutions on the planet. She claimed Argentina should have

01:31been eliminated at least five matches earlier and had only survived because FIFA wanted them alive.

01:35Then came the line that got subtitled and reposted several million times.

01:40Poor lo tanto amino mi de ningun mido Argentina, mi de mucho mido Infantino. I am not afraid of

01:45Argentina at all. I am afraid of Infantino. She went further, arguing that whoever met Argentina

01:50in the final would not be facing 11 Argentinians, but all of FIFA, an organization she said wanted to

01:56hand the World Cup to Lionel Messi. And here is the part that actually matters. Ronaldo did not invent

02:01that theory. He did not seed it, fund it, or caption it. He walked into a fire that had already

02:06been

02:06burning for three weeks and quietly added his name to the guest list. Because by mid-July 2026,

02:14this was not a fringe opinion held by bitter supporters in the replies. It was arguably the

02:19biggest story of the entire World Cup, and it had its own vocabulary. VA Argentina, Argent FIFA,

02:24FIFA's princess. Every one of those nicknames existed before Ronaldo tapped anything.

02:29There are many people who feel like Argentina and Lionel Messi are the darlings of FIFA.

02:35The accusation had two halves, and the first half was about the road itself. The claim was that

02:40Argentina had been handed a soft path to the final, while genuine contenders were stacked

02:45into the opposite side of the bracket, and that the draw had been engineered rather than earned.

02:49And Infantino does everything in his power to make sure that they have both an easy path.

02:54The second half was about the whistle, and this is where it got genuinely ugly.

02:58Match after match, millions of fans accused FIFA of keeping Argentina alive through refereeing

03:03decisions, pointing to a run in which they led the tournament in fouls committed while,

03:07by contemporaneous reporting, no VAR decision went against them until the very late stages.

03:12We will go through those decisions one by one, because several of them are far more

03:16defensible than the internet insisted, and at least two of them are far less.

03:20What Ronaldo's fanbase argued, loudly and constantly, boiled down to three positions.

03:25That Messi received protection no other player on earth receives, that Argentina were permitted

03:30a level of physicality that would have been punished in anybody else, and that the entire

03:34tournament was a coronation with a predetermined ending.

03:42The hostility did not stay theoretical either. A petition demanding Argentina be removed from the

03:48World Cup reportedly passed 20 million signatures. Neutrals who had spent their entire lives disliking England,

03:54found themselves supporting England in the semi-final purely to stop Argentina reaching the final.

03:59FIFA opened an investigation into racist conduct by Argentine supporters.

04:03Argentine players unfurled a Las Malvinas banner after eliminating England, in apparent conflict with

04:08FIFA's own prohibition on political messaging, and no immediate punishment followed, which every

04:13skeptic filed as further proof of a double standard. Reports emerged that the FBI was examining the

04:18Argentine Football Association over financial operations in the United States, involving allegations of

04:24money laundering and fraud. No charges were filed. Nothing connected it to a single player on the pitch.

04:29It got welded onto the conspiracy anyway. And running underneath all of it was the president himself.

04:34Gianni Infantino has cultivated a long, warm, heavily photographed relationship with Lionel Messi,

04:40that predates 2026 and intensified after Argentina's 2022 triumph. During this tournament, he publicly

04:46congratulated Messi after the semi-final win over England. Clips circulated of him looking visibly anxious

04:51and emotionally invested, while Argentina were losing. AI-generated memes casting Messi as FIFA's princess,

04:58alongside Infantino, pulled hundreds of thousands of interactions. None of that is evidence of corruption.

05:03All of it is spectacular optics for people who already believed. So when the most-followed footballer

05:09alive pressed a button on a video calling FIFA Mafia, he was not starting an argument. He was ratifying

05:14one. He handed 100 million people the endorsement they had been demanding for three weeks, and he did

05:19it without typing a single word that could be quoted back at him. The case he was endorsing.

05:25Here is what makes the like genuinely interesting rather than merely petty. Ronaldo did not invent this

05:30accusation. He did not seed it, fund it, or amplify it with a caption. He simply signed his name to

05:35something millions of people were already screaming about, and to be fair to those millions, the

05:40tournament had handed them a remarkable amount of raw material. The nickname arrived early and stuck

05:45like tar. VA Argentina. The case against, built decision by decision, went something like this.

05:57It started in the group stage against Algeria. Lionel Messi appeared to make studs up contact

06:01from behind on the calf and Achilles area of Algeria captain Aissa Mandi. Mandi went down

06:06in visible pain. No yellow card was shown. No red card was shown. The AR did not intervene at all.

06:11Messi then went on to score a hat trick in a 3-0 win, and Algeria later filed a formal

06:16complaint

06:16with FIFA about the officiating. Under the laws of the game, studs up contact from behind on the lower

06:21leg is frequently punished as serious foul play. The absence of any card, followed by a hat

06:26trick from the man who made the contact, was the first brick in the wall. The second brick,

06:31and the heaviest one, was Egypt. Round of 16 July 7 in Atlanta. Around the 58th minute,

06:37Mostafa Zico put the ball in the net to make it 2-0. After a lengthy VAR review, the goal

06:42was

06:42disallowed for a foul by Marouin Atiyah on Lissandro Martinez in the build-up, an incident that occurred

06:46roughly 100 yards from goal and amounted to a tangle of legs and a foot being stood on. Egypt scored

06:52anyway to lead 2-0. And then Argentina scored three times in roughly 13 minutes, the winner

06:57arriving through Enzo Fernandes in stoppage time, to steal a 3-2 result. Egypt's coach Hassam Hassan

07:03did not do diplomacy afterwards. He said there were factors influencing it, not external, but internal

07:09on the pitch, and external before the match. He said there seemed to have been pressure on the

07:13Argentinian side on the referee that brought about this outcome. He said flatly that the cup is

07:18directed towards Argentina. He asked whether they wanted the world champions kept in the competition,

07:23whether they wanted Messi to stay in the running, and added that it is all about money. He said life

07:27is unfair and the world is unfair, but asked why there is no fairness in the sport. He vowed that

07:31once he was home he would never watch the World Cup again, because there is no justice in this

07:35competition. He was booked during the match for making FIFA's own anti-racism gesture in protest.

07:40Goalscorer Mostafa Zico backed him. The Egyptian Football Association issued a formal statement,

07:45saying it could not remain silent. The awkward detail for FIFA is that Hassan was not alone in

07:51his reading. Former referees writing for major outlets argued the VAR intervention had violated

07:56the clear and obvious error threshold, describing it as re-refereeing rather than correcting a mistake.

08:02Football fans became convinced that Argentina weren't simply getting lucky, they were getting help.

08:07Four days later, the quarter-final against Switzerland delivered brick number three. At 1-1,

08:11Lindro Pairds was initially booked for a challenge on Breland below. VAR reviewed it under the

08:15tournament's newly introduced mistaken identity protocol, concluded Mbelo had gone down before

08:20meaningful contact, overturned the foul entirely, and gave Mbelo a second yellow and a red card.

08:25Switzerland played a long stretch and the whole of extra time with 10 men, and lost 3-1.

08:30Coach Murat Yakin called the decision unacceptable and incomprehensible, and said it destroyed the

08:35game. Mbelo was in tears. The protocol was technically correctly applied. That was never really

08:40the argument. The argument was that a rule almost nobody had heard of, used only once previously in

08:46the entire tournament, had materialized at the exact instant Switzerland found their footing.

08:50Then came England in the semi-final, and this is where the pattern stopped being about single

08:55decisions and started being about tolerance levels. The specific incident that pundits kept

09:04circling back to happened in the opening minutes. The challenge on Elliott Anderson involved contact

09:12toward the head and back area, and it produced no card at all. Not a red, not even a yellow.

09:22Argentina won 2-1. Referee Ismail Elfath was heavily criticized for losing control of the match,

09:27and the wider statistical framing did the rest of the work for the conspiracy. Across the tournament,

09:32Argentina led in fouls committed while, by contemporaneous reporting, no VAR decision

09:37went against them until the very late stages. Then there were the optics, and the optics were

09:42arguably worse than any single call. Gianni Infantino has cultivated a long, warm, extremely

09:48photographed relationship with Messi, going back well before 2026 and intensifying after Argentina's

09:532022 title. During this tournament, he publicly congratulated Messi after the semi-final win over

09:58England. Clips circulated of him looking visibly anxious and emotionally invested, while Argentina

10:03were losing, particularly around the Egypt match. AI-generated memes portraying Messi as FIFA's

10:09princess alongside Infantino, racked up hundreds of thousands of interactions, and the hashtags wrote

10:14themselves, Argent FIFA of Argentina. And around it, the noise thickened. The mayor of New York City said

10:20Egypt had been robbed. Argentine players unfurled a Las Malvinas banner after beating England,

10:24in apparent conflict with FIFA's prohibition on political messaging, and no immediate punishment

10:29followed. FIFA opened an investigation into racist conduct by Argentine supporters.

10:34Reports emerged that the FBI was investigating the Argentine Football Association over financial

10:40operations in the United States, with no charges filed, and no link whatsoever to anything on the

10:45pitch, which did not stop anyone from connecting it anyway. A petition to remove Argentina from the

10:50World Cup reportedly passed 20 million signatures. FIFA's refereeing chief Pierluigi Kalina repeatedly

10:56rejected the bias claims and defended the independence of match officials. He did it after

11:01Egypt. He did it again as the accusations mounted. By that stage, nobody arguing on the internet was

11:07listening, because the story had stopped being about refereeing and had become something far more

11:11useful. It had become a scoreboard in a 20-year war, and every new decision was simply another

11:16round of ammunition handed to whichever side wanted it. That is the environment Ronaldo's like dropped

11:21into. Not a calm debate about VAR thresholds. A bonfire that had already been burning for three weeks,

11:27with two of the largest fan communities on the planet standing around it holding petrol.

11:32The Script That Failed

11:34Now for the other side, because the other side is considerably stronger than the screenshots suggest.

11:39The first problem with the FIFA favors Messi theory is that a lot of serious football people

11:44looked at exactly the same evidence and found it embarrassing. This tournament has a lot of

11:50people feeling like it's scripted. The bracket argument was the loudest one,

11:53and it collapses quickest under examination. I didn't actually was supposed to play either Spain

11:58or Uruguay in the next round. The tournament is seated so that the biggest teams meet late.

12:04That is the design. It only breaks when the biggest teams fail to do their jobs in the group stage,

12:09and in 2026 they failed spectacularly. Uruguay were knocked out. Cape Verde finished second in a group

12:22where they held Spain to a scoreless draw and came through with a goal difference of zero. Portugal

12:27drew with Dr. Congo and drew with Colombia. Every one of those results shoved somebody into a bracket

12:32they were never meant to occupy. And then the counter-argument goes somewhere genuinely uncomfortable

12:44for the man who pressed like. FIFA favors Ronaldo. It sounds crazy, but FIFA...

12:49The example offered was a disciplinary matter from Portugal's own qualifying campaign, in which Ronaldo

12:55was sent off and faced an automatic three-match ban heading into the World Cup.

12:59What did Infantino do? Infantino went like, we can't miss Ronaldo for the World Cup.

13:03He served one match, the other two were suspended, a mechanism the panel described as effectively

13:08unprecedented in the sport. And then a second example, reaching back more than a decade to a

13:13Ballon d'Or race. The Ballon d'Or voting was supposed to be closed November 15th.

13:17Ronaldo scored a hat-trick against Sweden on November 19th of that year, four days after voting was

13:23supposed to have shut. FIFA extends the Ballon d'Or for the first and last time to November 29th.

13:29There's been a pattern upon pattern of FIFA favoring Ronaldo.

13:32There's been a pattern upon pattern of FIFA favoring Ronaldo. Whether you accept that framing

13:37or not, it establishes the essential shape of this argument. Both fan bases have a folder of grievances,

13:43both folders are thick, and both are curated with total ruthlessness.

13:47I'm sure you've seen that there's a huge beef on the internet right now between Messi fans and

13:51Ronaldo fans. They argue that Messi gets favorable calls. They argue that Argentina's a dirtier team.

13:57Inside professional punditry, the pushback was blunter. On the rest is football. Previewing the

14:01semi-final, Joe Cole said the whole world wanted Messi in the final, while explicitly clarifying he was

14:06not alleging any skullduggery from FIFA and was talking about vibes rather than corruption.

14:10That clarification did not survive the clipping process. His co-panelist John Mikkel Obi rejected

14:15the conspiracy outright, insisting Argentina had earned their root by winning their games.

14:20Nigerian outlets including Punch, Vanguard and Daily Post reported the exchange around July 14 and 15.

14:26Obi later expanded on the same theme. Then there is the football itself, which is the part the

14:45screenshots never included. Messi finished the campaign with 8 goals and 4 assists, 12 goal

14:50contributions out of the 19 goals Argentina scored across the tournament. He scored a hat-trick against

14:54Algeria at 38, the oldest player ever to do so at a World Cup, a brace against Austria,

14:59a goal against Jordan, a goal against Cape Verde, and a goal plus an assist during the Egypt comeback.

15:04He led or ranked near the top in chances created, dribbles and progressive actions. Referees do not

15:10create that. But the single most devastating rebuttal to the entire conspiracy was

15:24delivered on July 19, 2026, at MetLife Stadium, and it was delivered by Spain.

15:30Spain beat Argentina 1-0 after extra time, Ferran Tours scoring in the 106th minute. The performance

15:36was not close. Spain had around 65% possession, 20 shots with 12 on target, and 31 touches in the

15:43penalty area. Argentina managed 2 shots, none on target, 1 corner and 8 touches in the box. They went into

15:49half-time with zero shots and zero corners. Emiliano Martinez made a record 11 saves in a World Cup

15:54final, and it still was not enough. And in the 90-plus third minute, Enzo Fernandez was shown a second

16:08yellow and sent off, leaving Argentina to play the entire extra time period with 10 men. He became the

16:14immediate scapegoat in a tournament that had been defined by officiating controversy, and then ended

16:19with Argentina seeing red. Think about that for one second. If an all-powerful organization had spent

16:24six matches steering a trophy toward Lionel Messi, it chose the final itself to send off Argentina's

16:29midfield engine and let Spain, the same team that had eliminated Ronaldo's Portugal,

16:34walk away with the trophy. The alleged script did not merely fail. It failed on the biggest stage

16:38available in front of the largest audience in sport. Then came the ugly part. But the bad and

16:44the ugly certainly came at the end of the game, Shaq. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

16:48Scuffles broke out after the whistle. Pairds and Molina were central. Spain,

16:52by nearly every account, kept their composure throughout and looked like the cleaner side in

16:57every sense of the word. I don't think the image of the game will be hurt at all because of

17:01the result.

17:02Messi finished as a peripheral figure, described in reports as a ghost chasing Spanish players and

17:07rarely touching the ball anywhere dangerous. And yet even the harshest analysts refused to let that

17:12define him. But if we're talking about football, there's no one like Messi in the history of the

17:19of the game. So where does that leave the like? The evidence supports a perception problem, not a

17:24conspiracy. No credible documentation has ever shown Infantino or FIFA directing match officials or

17:30altering VAR protocols to favor Argentina. Several decisions were genuinely poor. Several were

17:35defensible. Almost all were subjective, which is what modern refereeing is made of. What made them

17:40explosive was not their merit. It was that two of the largest fan communities on earth were already

17:45loaded and waiting. And Spain's victory allowed one side to declare the script broken, while the other

17:50pointed at a team that finished with 10 men and no shots on target. Ronaldo did not write the theory.

17:55He did not narrate it, fund it, or say a word about it out loud. He simply pressed a button

18:00that told

18:00several hundred million people exactly where he stood, and then said nothing at all, which is a

18:05communication strategy he has been refining since 2008. Portugal went home on July 6. Messi played a

18:11World Cup final on July 19. The like sits somewhere between those two dates, and it is the loudest thing

18:17Cristiano Ronaldo never said. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed watching this video,

18:22click on one of the boxes playing on your screen to watch more similar content.

Ronaldo Believes FIFA Favored Messi At The World Cup

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