Kolkata’s love for football is legendary — a passion that appears glamorous from a distance but can turn volatile up close. Whenever a global football icon arrives, the city doesn’t simply assemble; it surges. And that is often where the trouble begins.
The issue is not Kolkata’s inability to manage crowds. Rather, repeated high-profile visits have exposed a deeper fault line: the divide between public access and elite privilege. From Pelé in the 1970s to Maradona in the 2000s and now Lionel Messi, the pattern has remained strikingly familiar. Fans invest their money, time, and emotion, while the powerful secure proximity. The distance between the two becomes painfully visible.
Messi and the privilege of visibility
The recent controversy surrounding Messi’s appearance in Kolkata was not just about crowd size or event duration. At its core was the denial of visibility itself.
Public anger stemmed from the feeling that the moment was being consumed by a moving barricade of VIPs, officials, and security personnel. Fans who had paid for tickets and waited for hours found their view blocked by entourages, forced to strain for a glimpse of the star they had come to see. When people feel they have funded an event they cannot even properly witness, celebration quickly gives way to resentment.
A stadium crowd can tolerate delays and stringent security checks. What it finds harder to accept is the perception that the real spectacle is unfolding within a privileged enclosure, while the paying public is reduced to spectators of logistics rather than history. Once that belief sets in, every restriction feels personal, and every VIP photo opportunity looks like appropriation.
That emotional tipping point is what turns excitement into unrest — not the presence of a football legend, but the reminder of who is allowed to truly experience the moment.