No technical coaching for Lionel Messi once he hangs up his cleats. Head-coaching would be all right, but club ownership is what he would most look forward to. Ideally, he’d start something from scratch and build it up, giving the young a chance to grow and thrive. So he says in the closing minute of a loose and cheery podcast (in Spanish) posted to Luzu TV on Jan. 6.
These days Messi is playing for Inter Miami on a contract extended through the 2028 season of Major League Soccer (MLS), during which he will turn 40. His initial Inter Miami contract – lasting through 2025 with a 2026 option – was worth $150 million, according to OneFootball.com.
Like many other athletes, he has not waited for his last contract to run out before entering the equity game. The Inter Miami contract reportedly includes a minority stake in the club as well as a share of MLS Season Pass subscriptions through the ten-year media-rights contract the club has signed with Apple.
In October 2022 Messi established a vehicle, called Play Time Sports-Tech HoldCo (San Francisco), through which to invest in sports, media and tech. His co-founder, Razmig Hovaghimian, serves as CEO.
Two of Play Time’s investments relate to sports. One is in a previous project co-founded by Hovaghimian: Matchday.com, a platform for fantasy football (i.e., soccer), whose licensing goes through the association of footballer unions, FIFPRO (Fédération Internationale des Associations de Footballeurs Professionnels). The other is in Momento, producer of an app for fan scrapbooking. Play Time’s other investments venture further into tech.
SuperAnnotate (San Francisco), for instance, specializes in “human data and evaluation pipelines” for agentic, multimodal and frontier AI and has established partnerships with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nvidia and IBM.
Perceptron (Plymouth, Michigan) is building physical artificial general intelligence (AGI): that is, systems to enable AI to understand and deal with the real world. (A perceptron is the simplest possible artificial neural network.)
FieldAI (Irvine, California) is building AI for robots – specifically, field foundation models (FFMs) to “enable any embodiment to autonomously operate in highly dynamic environments without GPS.” It employs veterans from Deepmind, NASA JPL, Tesla, Nvidia and Amazon.
It seems, though, that sports will forever be part of Messi’s portfolio. In September 2024 he founded, along with Smuggler Entertainment, a production company called 525 Rosario (Miami, Los Angeles). This in turn established The Messi Cup, an international football tournament for players under 16. The first edition was held this past December in Miami.
