Play like Messi!

The five-year Murtaza Ahmadi kicks ball inside the headquarters of the Football Federation of Afghanistan in Kabul. The boy wears a shirt like that of the Spanish club Barcelona’s star player Lionel Messi, only made from... a plastic bag. Ahmadi, who lives in a rural area of Afghanistan, became famous throughout the world after photos of him playing soccer in this “uniform” had gone viral on the Internet. The boy has been nicknamed the “Afghan Messi.”

His father Arif Ahmadi admitted in a comment for Eurosport later on that the family could not afford a real shirt, because he was a simple farmer. Therefore, his soccer-loving and Messi-admiring son put the bag on. The boy learned of his instant fame from friends who have access to the Internet. By the way, there is no active soccer clubs in today’s Afghanistan due to a lack of funds and security issues plaguing the country.

Ahmadi’s Argentinean idol Messi won the title of the world’s best player on five occasions. In particular, he won the Ballon d’Or in 2015. The famous athlete knows about his young fan and strives to meet him. Incidentally, it was not easy to identify the “Afghan Messi”: people thought at first that he lived in      Iraq, and it was only recently that another Afghan Azim Ahmadi released online a photo of his nephew who was then identified as the boy in the plastic bag. We hope that Ahmadi and Messi will meet. And who knows – maybe Ahmadi will receive a Ballon d’Or of his own one day.