It was 10 days ago, just before 3am on a Thursday morning, when the gunshots rang out in Rosario.

The crackle of bullets has become a depressingly familiar soundtrack in Argentina’s second city. What made this incident different was the target: a Unico supermarket in the west of the city, one of a chain owned by José Roccuzzo, the father-in-law of Lionel Messi.

And just to underline that this was no random attack, there was a note left along with the 14 bullet holes in the shop front. It was simple and chilling: “Messi, we are waiting for you.”

Messi, who was born in Rosario and grew up there, has long maintained that he wanted to finish his playing career at Newell’s Old Boys, along with Rosario Central the city’s most famous club and where his football journey began as a child. But that message — conveyed in such brutal fashion — has surely made that hope a mere pipe dream.

Investigations into the attack on Roccuzzo’s store — in which nobody was harmed — are ongoing. One hypothesis is that it was perpetrated by a gang of drug traffickers, the other points to corrupt police.

In the event that the threat is proven to be from one of the city’s narco gangs, what do they intend to do? The strongest hypothesis is that they are seeking attention first and foremost, and to frighten. Targeting Messi tells the world how powerful they are in Rosario – that nobody is beyond their reach. It is the consequences of the threat, as much as the threat itself, that is significant.

Rosario, a major port where ships bearing grain from the surrounding Pampa Húmeda — the fertile grasslands in east Argentina — would depart via the mighty Paraná River, now counts cocaine cultivated in Bolivia and ‘packaged’ in Paraguay as one of its fastest-growing exports. The fields outside Rosario are regularly ‘bombed’ by unregistered planes, which drop bales of cocaine that are then collected and hidden in the cornfields.

As the traffickers have increased in number and power, so have the gangs and the violence that comes with them. Rosario’s murder rate of 22 every 100,000 stands at five times the national average and the killings have become increasingly brutal and seemingly random.

Just last month, Lorenzo Altamirano, a 28-year-old music teacher and juggler, was walking home after rehearsing with his friends in the punk band Bombas de Rabia (Rage Bombs) when a car stopped next to him and took him away. Minutes later, he was found dead at the entrance to Newell’s stadium, named after Marcelo Bielsa, the former coach of Leeds United, Athletic Bilbao and Argentina.

Altamirano — who had no known links to drugs or violence — had been used as a “messenger corpse” by a drug gang, with a letter placed with his body. In the wake of the murder, the national security minister, Aníbal Fernández, simply declared: “The narcos have won.” Even in a country that has become hardened to gang violence, it was a phrase that shocked many to the core.

Pablo Javkin, the centre-left mayor of Rosario, went to the Unico supermarket in the wake of the attack to renew his plea to the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernandez, for more federal resources to combat the drug gangs, although he himself has also been the target of threats. In the same message that threatened Messi, the gunmen added: “Javkin is also a drug trafficker, so he won’t take care of you.”

Messi has not commented on the attack, but he would not be human if he was not shaken by it. He left Rosario in 2000, aged just 13, but the city remains close to his heart.

Josep Maria Minguella, the coach and agent who facilitated Barcelona’s signing of Messi and Diego Maradona before him, notes that Messi’s accent never bent to his adopted Spain. “He doesn’t even speak like an Argentinian: he still speaks in Rosarino,” Minguella says.

Messi returns every year — not, admittedly, to La Bajada, the working-class neighbourhood where he grew up and which has now been taken over by the violence, but to the Kentucky Country Club in Funes, on the outskirts of Rosario. There, he has no need for bodyguards. But the notion that Messi ever returns to Rosario permanently seems increasingly remote in the wake of last week’s events. The World Cup winner has spent most of his recent years either in Gava, a tranquil town on the Mediterranean coast about half an hour from Barcelona, or the most luxurious areas of Paris.

Having left Argentina as a 13-year-old, Messi is essentially a European, even if his bond with his home country remains strong, particularly in the wake of the triumphant World Cup campaign in Qatar in December. And he is, above all, the father of three children. Does he really want to subject them to the stress and danger of living in a city locked in a war against drug traffickers, just to fulfil a romantic notion of his career coming full circle?

“The drug violence in Rosario and the mafia threat to Messi undoubtedly hit the waterline of both the Rosario ‘brand’ and the Argentina ‘brand’,” Andy Stalman, an Argentinian marketing expert and owner of the Totem agency, told The Athletic.

“Messi is one of the five most recognised and loved personalities on the planet, let’s not forget that. This is going to negatively affect both brands and can generate a lot of fallout, concern and fear among potential visitors and tourists.”

Messi knows his decisions — indeed, his mere presence, especially post-Qatar — have political implications. If the weeks after the World Cup were itself a football match, it could be said he dedicated the first half to the Peronist government and the second half to the opposition of former president Mauricio Macri.

In December, returning from Qatar with the World Cup, Messi and his team-mates decided they would not visit the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, to give President Fernández a photo with the trophy. Two months later, at the FIFA Best Awards, Messi opted to appear in a photo with Mauricio Macri, the centre-right former Argentinian President who now leads the world governing body’s official foundation.

Macri, who for 12 years was also the president of Boca Juniors, became the only Argentinian politician of note to have a photo with Messi. There was even that modern equivalent of a papal blessing: Messi choosing to follow Macri on his Instagram account.

These manoeuvrings, in a year in which the opposition has a very good chance of ousting the Peronists from government, is no small matter: after years in which he was viewed with some suspicion by a chunk of Argentinian society thanks, in part, to his decision to leave the country at such a young age, Messi is now a figure of enormous influence. Any politician would want him on their side.

Messi is unlikely to go further than a photo. Politics, ultimately, does not interest him particularly and certainly not when his football career is still yielding such glories.

It brought to mind the stories of Amador Bernabéu, Gerard Piqué’s grandfather and strongman of FC Barcelona, approaching the teenage Messi and reiterating an offer that had already been made to him several times before: to pledge his international future to Spain.

Messi’s response then and on every other occasion was unambiguous: “No, my dream is to play for Argentina.”

That dream was quickly fulfilled; winning the World Cup took a little longer, but now that, too, has been chalked off.

The notion of returning to Rosario, the city he once called home, however, was surely blown away by those 14 bullets fired into a nondescript supermarket 10 days ago.

Source: theathletic.com