Opening
In February 2024, Lionel Messi’s Asian tour with Inter Miami began as a sports controversy about fitness, commercial expectations, and match arrangements. Before the team arrived in Hong Kong, reports had already suggested that Messi was experiencing physical discomfort during the Saudi leg of the tour, although descriptions of the injury varied. Pre-match messaging nevertheless remained optimistic, leading many fans and members of the public to assume that he would probably play. Yet on 4 February, Messi remained on the bench throughout the Hong Kong friendly. A few days later, however, he appeared as a substitute in Japan. This contrast pushed what should have remained a sporting dispute into a much larger public controversy.
What mattered even more was what happened next online. The controversy quickly moved beyond discussion of injury, scheduling, or event management and turned into large-scale abuse, hostile labelling, meme-based humiliation, and collective online shaming across Chinese platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, and Hupu. Sports controversies are no longer just about fans arguing. Under platform amplification, identity conflict, and emotional mobilisation, they can rapidly escalate into digital harm.
Thesis
This article argues that the Messi Hong Kong controversy became a large-scale episode of online abuse not simply because fans were emotional or disappointed. Platforms amplify content that is emotional, polarising, and easy to spread. At the same time, long-standing identity conflicts between fan groups, combined with nationalist sentiment, compress complex events into simple “us versus them” judgments. When platform governance becomes delayed, inconsistent, or selectively enforced, these conflicts scale up further. A sports controversy is then transformed into digital harm that affects not only the athlete and core fan communities, but also ordinary users and public discussion online.
What counts as hate speech and digital harm
Not all online abuse automatically counts as hate speech. Some expressions are better understood as insults; others are closer to harassment. However, when speech begins to revolve around group identity, casting certain people as a hostile “other” and subjecting them to collective denigration, it moves beyond ordinary criticism and becomes much closer to identity-based hate. As Guan and Chen (2026) argue, the way people process news and express opinions is shaped by identity politics, in which in-group members are valued while out-group members are denigrated.
Digital harm is broader than hate speech alone. It includes not only content that can be clearly identified as hateful, but also mass humiliation, coordinated pile-ons, hostile labelling, meme-based abuse, and an online environment in which people become afraid to speak. Carlson and Frazer (2018) note that online racism can have real and harmful effects on users’ health and wellbeing. In sports-related online spaces, these concepts often overlap. Not every post meets a strict definition of hate speech, but repeated and amplified hostile content can still produce serious harm.
Why do sports controversies escalate so quickly online
Sports controversies escalate quickly online because platforms are structured to favour highly emotional, conflict-driven, and interactive content. Expressions shaped by anger, humiliation, moral judgment, and provocation are more likely to gain visibility through recommendations, likes, reposts, comment rankings, and trending systems. As Matamoros-Fernández (2017) argues, measurable engagement does not simply reflect popularity; it also grants harmful discourse greater relevance and legitimacy while shaping how algorithms distribute it.
Much of the abuse that circulates in sports-related online spaces does not always appear as straightforward formal hate speech. Instead, it is often packaged as memes, jokes, ironic slang, short-video edits, parody, or fan “banter”. Once hostility is entertainmentised in this way, it becomes easier to reproduce, easier to circulate, and harder to moderate. It also lowers the threshold for participation. A limited sporting dispute can therefore become a large-scale emotional event in which outrage is repeatedly produced, copied, and consumed.
The Messi Hong Kong controversy
The original controversy was not, in itself, especially complicated. Before Messi arrived in Hong Kong, multiple reports had already suggested that he was experiencing physical discomfort during Inter Miami’s Saudi tour, meaning that the public was not entirely unaware of injury-related risk. At the same time, pre-match messaging did not fully rule out the possibility that he might play. On the contrary, statements from the club and optimistic media framing helped sustain the expectation that, unless the injury was very serious, Messi would probably appear. Reuters (2024) reported that Inter Miami’s medical staff deemed Messi unfit to play in Hong Kong, a late decision that disappointed both fans and organisers.
What intensified the controversy was the contrast that followed. On 4 February, Messi did not play in Hong Kong. Yet only a few days later, he appeared as a substitute in Japan. The issue quickly became more than whether one player had participated in one match. It became about the visible inconsistency between pre-match expectations, the result in Hong Kong, and the later appearance in Japan. This inconsistency encouraged multiple interpretations and pushed a sporting issue into a broader public controversy.
Why this controversy was especially combustible in China
This event did not emerge in an empty discursive space. It landed in an already polarised fan environment shaped by long-term rivalry and accumulated hostility. Comparisons between Messi and Ronaldo, and years of conflict between their supporters, had already produced a particularly sensitive atmosphere on Chinese platforms.
Against that background, “not playing in Hong Kong but playing in Japan” was no longer just an issue of scheduling or injury management. It became a trigger for reinterpretation and emotional mobilisation. The Hong Kong incident did not begin from zero. It fell onto an already combustible field of rivalry, grievance, and symbolic competition, and the Japan factor intensified that emotional charge even further.
From fan disagreement to identity conflict
The incident escalated so rapidly not just because information was unclear or because the public was disappointed that Messi did not play. More importantly, it was reorganised through the existing culture of fan rivalry and long-standing camp opposition on Chinese platforms. Comparisons between Messi and Ronaldo have long exceeded the boundaries of sport alone and become part of a durable identity structure online.
The Hong Kong incident therefore did not simply provide a new news event. It offered an opportunity for older hostilities to erupt again. For some fans already invested in long-term rivalry, the contrast between Hong Kong and Japan was quickly reduced to a new excuse for settling scores and choosing sides. Guan and Chen (2026) argue that differences in social identity can provoke threat perceptions and forms of othering that marginalise and demonise certain groups. Public discussion then stopped revolving around facts and instead turned into a judgment about which side one belonged to.
How nationalism intensified the controversy
On Chinese social media, the incident soon became more than a sports controversy. Because the Japan match followed only a few days after the Hong Kong game, and because Messi later appeared in Japan, the controversy acquired a stronger symbolic dimension. A large number of comments began to focus on whether Messi “respected China” and whether he had been willing to play in Japan but not in Hong Kong.
Guan and Chen (2026) suggest that compared with straightforward material conflicts, differences in values, perceived moral violations, and the need for meaningful coherence can generate stronger and more lasting hatred and intolerance between groups. In this case, once the controversy was rewritten as a question of whether China had been respected, some users and fan communities reframed it as a matter of national dignity rather than injury management or match scheduling. When nationalist sentiment and fan rivalry overlapped, complex facts were compressed into very simple judgments.
How platforms scaled the abuse
The controversy became a sustained online pile-on because of the way platforms structured and circulated the dispute. As Matamoros-Fernández (2017) shows in another context, harmful discourse can emerge through the entanglement of users’ practices, platform features, and algorithmic circulation. In the Messi case, abusive content on Weibo, Douyin, and Hupu did not spread accidentally. It was amplified through recommendation systems, reposting, trending lists, comment interaction, and secondary content creation. Matamoros-Fernández (2017) also argues that the networked nature of social media allows harmful discourse to thrive across platforms in decontextualised form.
In practice, Weibo’s trending topics and comment sections were filled with insulting language. Some users mapped the history of Japanese aggression against China onto Messi and his supporters, portraying Chinese fans who still supported him as aligned with Japan. On Douyin, comment sections and short-video content were saturated with meme-based humiliation and hostile edits, while Hupu’s camp culture and combative reply patterns pushed the conflict further. In this environment, abuse became a format that could be copied, consumed, and circulated again.
Who gets harmed
The consequences of this escalation were not limited to the fact that the controversy became widely known online. It directly harmed the target of abuse, but it also affected ordinary fans and users who merely expressed a different opinion. Not only Messi and his supporters became objects of attack; many ordinary users in China who simply expressed support or offered alternative interpretations were rapidly labelled “Japanese”, “unpatriotic”, or even “traitors”. Rational discussion was mocked and humiliated, while public discussion spaces on these platforms became increasingly dominated by polarised language.
Carlson and Frazer (2018) remind us that social media is not a neutral space. In this case, once a particular position was rapidly stigmatised across platforms, the expressive safety and sense of belonging of ordinary users were also damaged. When a platform environment shifts toward a situation in which failing to repeat the dominant emotional line leads to collective attack, many people will choose silence in order to avoid being targeted.
Why moderation often fails
Moderation often fails not simply because there is too much content, but because of the limitations of platform governance itself and the uncertainty of the wider information environment. Much harmful content is disguised as jokes, memes, irony, or “just having fun,” which makes it easier to slip past moderation. Woods and Perrin (2022) warn that there are risks not only in non-enforcement, but also in slow, erratic, and unequal enforcement. In the Messi case, moderation was often delayed, inconsistent, or unclear, encouraging users to keep testing the boundaries of what they could get away with.
Users also do not interpret moderation in a vacuum. Matamoros-Fernández (2017) argues that social media platforms are under scrutiny because they often apply policies inconsistently in relation to cultural difference and hate speech. In this case, many users inferred what was “allowed” by reading broader informational signals. During the Hong Kong incident and the following Lunar New Year period, the silence of some mainstream media could easily be misread as a sign that the current direction of hostility was acceptable. Such ambiguity encouraged further boundary-testing and deepened governance instability.
What should platforms do differently
Platform governance should not be understood simply as deleting a few posts after harm has already spread. More importantly, platforms need to reduce the risk that harm will be amplified at scale in the first place. As Woods and Perrin (2022) argue, the key is a systemic approach: governance must shift from focusing only on specific items of content to a broader model of risk management. Platforms therefore need to examine recommendation systems, rankings, sharing mechanisms, trend logics, and cross-platform circulation, not just whether one item formally violates a rule.
At the same time, moderation needs to become more transparent. Users should be able to see what kinds of content are being acted upon, why those decisions are being made, and what standards platforms apply to meme-based humiliation and coordinated pile-ons.
Conclusion
Sports controversy will always exist. Comparisons between athletes’ ability, honours, awards, and historical status are among the most debated subjects in sports culture. But such controversy should not be transformed by platform structures into scalable harm. As someone who directly experienced that wave of online hostility, I do not believe that problems of digital governance can be reduced to the claim that “fans were simply too emotional.” The Messi Hong Kong incident shows how platforms, identity politics, symbolic nationalism, and governance failure can combine to produce digital-age online violence.
References
Carlson, B., & Frazer, R. (2018). Social media mob: Being Indigenous online. Macquarie University.
Guan, T., & Chen, X. (2026). Threat perception, otherness and hate speech in China’s cyberspace. Journal of Contemporary China, 35(158), 1337–1352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2025.2475051
Matamoros-Fernández, A. (2017). Platformed racism: The mediation and circulation of an Australian race-based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Information, Communication & Society, 20(6), 930–946. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1293130
Reuters. (2024, February 4). Messi misses Miami’s Hong Kong friendly as organisers demand explanation. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/sports/soccer/love-heartbreak-king-messis-inter-miami-hit-hong-kong-2024-02-04/
Woods, L., & Perrin, W. (2022). Obliging platforms to accept a duty of care. In M. Moore & D. Tambini (Eds.), Regulating big tech: Policy responses to digital dominance (pp. 93–109). Oxford University Press.
Be the first to comment