The Child playing football in this video is not Lionel Messi's son Mateo Messi - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
December 28, 2022
A video of a kids’ football game is being shared on social media claiming that the child who scores a goal in this video is the son of Argentina football player Lionel Messi. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of Lionel Messi’s son Mateo Messi scoring a goal.
Fact: The child in the video is not Mateo Messi, son of Lionel Messi. A Belgium-based football club named R.S.C. Anderlecht shared this video of kids playing football on TikTok. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
We performed a reverse image search using a few screenshots from the viral video. This led us to a news article  published by afriupdate.com titled ‘Kid wrongly identified as Mateo Messi goes viral among Barca fans with solo golazo.‘ This article contains screenshots from the viral video. “The problem is, though, that the boy in the video is not Mateo Messi. To begin with, Leo Messi said in the past that all of his sons were right-footed, so it couldn’t have been Mateo.“
For more details, we performed a keyword search, leading us to a few news articles about this video from June 2022. According to them, the child playing football is not Mateo Messi. You can read them here and here.
The fact-checking website ‘dogrulukpayi’ wrote an article on this video which said, ‘Veronica Brunati’, a sports journalist from Argentina, found that the child who was mistaken for Mateo Messi is a player at a Belgium football club named R.S.C. Anderlecht. She posted a link to a TikTok video that the club uploaded on January 2022.
This is the same video that is being shared in the viral post. You can also watch another video of the same child scoring a goal here.
To summarise, the child playing football in this video is not Lionel Messi’s son Mateo Messi.