Leo Messi is widely regarded as one of the greatest sporting icons that the world has ever witnessed. He is most commonly known as the Barceloпa forward who scores freely and terrifies every defense he comes up against week after week, having won the prestigious Balloп d’Or award.
Leo Messi, the famous Argentinian footballer, is not only known for his impressive skills on the field but also for his remarkable charity work. Using a portion of his £310 million fortune, Messi primarily provides aid through his Leo Messi Foundation to children in need, inspired by his own experiences as a sickly child in Argentina requiring daily injections to combat a growth deficiency. As a UNICEF ambassador, Messi travels around the world to help those from underprivileged backgrounds. In 2007, he founded his charity after being moved to tears during a visit to a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met terminally ill children. His goal is to use his success to make a positive impact and help those who need it the most.
After encountering a terminally ill child at a hospital, Messi established his own foundation. The foundation was created to support individuals in need.
Messi, the soccer star from Barcelona, recently shared that it brings him joy to see people who are ill wearing a smile on their face when he meets them.
Messi’s early struggles with a growth defect required daily injections, but that experience led him to create the Leo Messi Foundation. The foundation aims to help children battling illness, promote health education, and support sick children and their families. It works with hospitals and clinics in both Argentina and Spain, making several donations for specialized equipment and rare disease research. The foundation’s newest project is building a pediatric oncology center at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona, which will be one of the largest in Europe and is estimated to cost around £30m. The center is set to open in the second half of 2020 and reflects Messi’s ongoing commitment to making sick children happy.
Lionel Messi has promised approximately £30 million towards constructing the SJD Pediatric Centre.
A young boy helped Messi lay the first stone in building the SJD Pediatric Centre at Hospital Sant Joan de Deu. Since 2014, the Leo Messi Foundation has been providing financial assistance to the Special Olympics in Catalonia to promote sports practice, social integration, and improve the quality of life for people with disabilities. Messi believes in the importance of these values and attends the event every year to meet the athletes and wish them well, which has spawned the Twitter trend #messiisalwayswithus. This year, Messi’s charity began working with the Josep Carreras Foundation to fund research into childhood leukemia. As part of the “No Child With Leukemia” campaign, Messi has promised to fund the study for the next two years, which focuses on a type of lymphoblastic leukemia that affects babies under one year old.
Messi has teamed up with the Josep Carreras Foundation this year to support research on childhood leukemia, as shown in a YouTube video by FC Barcelona.
Leo Messi Foundation will provide funding for the Josep Carreras Foundation over the next two years. The foundation has also supported the research into rhabdomyosarcoma, a tumor that affects young people and adults, with a donation of £200,000 over a four-year period. The Hospital Sant Joan de Deu Barcelona has achieved encouraging results in its project and aims to secure a first clinical trial to further progress research into this disease. In addition to his foundation, Messi has been a UNICEF ambassador since 2010, traveling the world to help those less fortunate. He provided aid to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, visited Bangkok to play football with young people with disabilities in 2013, and offered financial assistance for the construction of health centers in Nepal after the earthquake in 2015.
In 2010, Messi was appointed as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador.
Messi generously gifted a sum of approximately £200,000 to a small village in Kenya, according to reports. The news came from the official account of the Messi Foundation on social media. The Argentine football star continues to show his support for charitable causes across the world.
Lionel Messi’s wealth was used to purchase a water pump that has enabled both children and adults to access clean water. The foundation named @fundaciomessi was responsible for this noble act.
A group of Barcelona stars, including Lionel Messi, visited sick children at a hospital in Spain. In the same year, Messi generously donated £315,000 to UNICEF’s Spanish equivalent, ‘Un Sol Para Los Chicos’, which helps children in need. Moreover, in 2016, the Leo Messi Foundation launched the ‘Back to Learning’ program, aimed at helping children affected by the Syrian War return to school by constructing prefabricated classrooms. The foundation also donated around £200,000 to construct water pumps in Kenya and provide nutritional supplies to combat child malnutrition. One of Messi’s most famous charitable acts was when he met six-year-old Afghan child, Murtaza Ahmadi, who was living in extreme poverty while wearing a blue plastic bag with Messi’s name and number. After seeing the images on social media, Messi sent him a signed Barcelona jersey and a football. The organizing committee for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar then invited the boy and Messi to Doha, where they met as Barcelona played a friendly against Al Ahli. Messi will undoubtedly continue to make dreams come true for boys in the years to come.
Murtaza Ahmadi, a six-year-old boy from Afghanistan, proudly displays his bespoke Messi jersey in a photo that has gone viral.
Messi gave the young boy a Barcelona shirt with his signature on it.
Ahmadi had the chance to meet his idol Messi in Qatar during a friendly match of Barcelona.