74.5 million likes. That is the number that turns a photo of Lionel Messi into the post with the most interactions in all of Instagram history.
Two days after lifting the World Cup with Argentina at Qatar 2022, the image carousel uploaded by the Rosario native surpassed the record that seemed impossible to beat: the photo of a simple egg that Chris Godfrey posted as a social experiment in January 2019 and that had accumulated 57 million likes. Messi overtook it with crushing speed. “World champions! I dreamed of it so many times, I wanted it so much that it still hasn’t sunk in”, he wrote in the caption.
Messi’s dominance on Instagram goes beyond that post: eight of the ten most-liked posts on the entire platform feature either him or Cristiano Ronaldo. A kind of football that, clearly, no longer lives only in stadiums.