Messi got an ovation from a packed theater in Spain on Friday, with the King and Queen in the room, and he gave it about 30 seconds with his eyes on the floor, fiddling with his jacket button.
Then you see who else was on that stage.
One of them was Christina Koch. She flew around the Moon back in April, the first woman ever to do it.
Three more were the scientists who made reading DNA cheap. Two Cambridge chemists, David Klenerman and Shankar Balasubramanian, plus a French biophysicist named Pascal Mayer. Their work took the cost of reading one full human genome from over a billion dollars and about a decade down to roughly a thousand bucks and a single day. The company the two chemists started became Illumina, and most DNA sequencing on the planet still runs on their method.
Studio Ghibli was up there too, the studio behind Spirited Away, along with Patti Smith and the novelist Julian Barnes.
Messi was the most famous person in that building by a mile. Spanish reporters in the room said it looked like he didn't want to pull any of the spotlight off everyone else, so he let the applause go and got out of the way.
The award is the Princess of Asturias, which people in Spain call the Spanish Nobel. The same foundation honored Nelson Mandela back in 1992.
Football has had a weird history with this prize. Brazil's national team won it in 2002, Spain's won in 2010, and Casillas and Xavi shared it in 2012. In 2009 the jury had a Barcelona team that had just won the treble with a 22-year-old Messi, and they voted it out before the final round. A Russian pole vaulter ended up winning.
Seventeen years later, he's the first footballer to ever win it by himself.
Princess Leonor handed it to him and told the room she wasn't sure anything else on earth could make the whole world feel the same thing at the same moment.
He didn't give a speech. A guy with eight Ballon d'Ors was standing next to the people who made the genome cheap to read and a woman who'd just been to the Moon, and he treated his own ovation like he was holding up the line.
Omo, let me quickly drop this gist before my phone battery decides to join its ancestors, because the level of wicked human beings roaming this street of Lagos is actually alarming. 😭
So back in 2023, my close guy, Femi, and I decided to start a small logistics and agro-commodity supply hustle. You know how the country was, everybody was looking for legitimate side money. Femi was the "operations guy" because he had a bike and claimed he knew every shortcut in Lagos, while I handled the funding, client calls, and social media. We were practically brothers. If I ate garri, Femi was drinking the water.
Fast forward to a major deal in December. A big restaurant owner in Lekki placed a huge emergency order for 50 bags of dried peppers and plantains for their end-of-year catering. Total contract value: ₦1.8 million. Profit margin? Clean ₦400,000 to be shared 50/50.
I drained my savings, sourced the goods from the farm, loaded everything into a hired bus, and sent Femi to execute the delivery and collect the cash or transfer.
Around 4:00 PM, I called Femi: "How far, bro? Delivery complete?"
Femi's voice was shaking like someone inside cold room: "Bro! Disaster! I'm at the venue, but as I was parking, two police officers and task force packed the bus! They said our paperwork is fake! They are demanding ₦500,000 bribe or they will confiscate everything!"
Before I could even shout, Femi said, "Hold on, let me negotiate!" and hung up.
Five minutes later, he called back crying: "Omo, they took the keys! But wait, my uncle's friend in police station says if we pay ₦200k cash right now, they'll release the driver and goods, but the buyer said they can't wait anymore and canceled the order! We lost everything, bro!"
I sat on the bare floor of my room, holding my head. ₦1.8m vanished into thin air. Femi sounded so devastated on the phone that I even started comforting him. I told him, "It's okay bro, life happens. We will rebuild." I literally sent him ₦15k out of my last ₦20k so he could take Uber home and "rest his head."
Two weeks later, I was stuck in traffic near Victoria Island, sweating inside a yellow bus, when I looked out the window.
Guess who I saw sitting in the outdoor lounge of a high-end restaurant, wearing a fresh designer agbada, popping expensive champagne, and laughing with two ladies?
FEMI.
Not only was he living his best life, but parked right in front of him was a brand-new iPhone 14 Pro Max and a heavy gold chain dangling from his neck.
Omo. My brain did a quick restart. Windows Error 404.
My heart dropped into my stomach. I rubbed my eyes. Is this Femi or his twin brother that was separated at birth?!
The internal monologue in my head was wilder than a Nollywood soundtrack: "Omo... so police task force did not arrest anybody? The buyer did not cancel order? Femi used my sweat to buy Afeez Owo agbada and pop Moët? Guy, you are not Judas Iscariot, you are his regional manager!"
I immediately tapped the bus conductor, jumped out of the moving bus, and walked straight into the restaurant like a ghost from the underworld.
When Femi lifted his glass to take a sip and his eyes met mine, his face instantly turned from chocolate to pale yellow. The champagne glass froze mid-air.
I didn't shout. I didn't fight. I just quietly walked to his table, picked up his brand-new iPhone 14 Pro Max, grabbed his car keys on the table, and said softly into his ear:
"Femi, since task force collected our ₦1.8 million, let me help you hold these ones so police will not seize them too."
The way Femi started begging in front of those girls, sweating profusely inside AC, was pure cinema. Turns out he had delivered the goods, collected full payment in cash, lied that police seized it, and pocketed the entire ₦1.8 million to finance his fake "big boy" lifestyle.
I collected the phone, sold it the next day to recover part of my capital, and blocked his entire lineage on all platforms.
Assume I owe you money. At repayment, I give you 3 options:
- Take your money and go
- Let me double it on Betwinner with 2 odds. If I win, you get 80% of the winnings.
- If I lose, you get 50% of the original loan back and forfeit the rest
Which one are you taking?