Most famous couples have a meet-cute. Lionel Messi and Antonela Roccuzzo have something closer to a family tree: they met as small children in Rosario, Argentina, because her cousin played football with him. Thirty-odd years, three countries and two World Cup finals later, she is still the person in the stands he looks for. This page first went up in January 2023, a few weeks after Qatar, and it got the wedding year wrong, so here is the corrected and updated story.
The cousin, the kitchen, the boy from the youth team
The connection was Lucas Scaglia, Antonela’s cousin, who played on a Rosario youth team with Messi. CNN Sports reported that young Leo spent more and more time at the Scaglia house, and nobody seriously believes it was for the cousin. They were friends, not a couple. Then, at 13, Messi moved to Spain to join FC Barcelona, and Antonela stayed in Argentina with her family.
I find this part the most touching, and the least glamorous. Long-distance childhood friendships usually end with a phone call nobody returns. This one didn’t.
The trip home that changed things
The turning point was a sad one. Antonela’s close friend was killed in a car accident, and Messi, by then playing in Spain, flew back to Rosario to be with her. Argentina’s Para Ti and Goal tell the story the same way, though they disagree on the year (2005 or 2007), so I’ll leave it at “the mid-2000s.” What matters is the flight, not the date.
Messi confirmed he was in a relationship in a 2009 TV interview, and by 2010 the couple were being photographed together on holiday in Rio de Janeiro. The older version of this page also repeated a colorful quote from an alleged ex-boyfriend. I couldn’t find it anywhere reliable, so it’s gone.
Three sons, then the “wedding of the century”
The children came before the wedding: Thiago on November 2, 2012, and Mateo on September 11, 2015. On June 30, 2017, Leo and Antonela married at the City Center hotel and casino complex in Rosario, with about 260 guests. Clarín called it “the wedding of the century.” Barcelona teammates Neymar, Luis Suárez and Gerard Piqué came, Piqué with Shakira, and Argentine singer Abel Pintos sang “Sin principio ni final” during the exchange of rings. Ciro, the youngest, followed in March 2018.
(For the record: the wedding was 2017, not 2019, as this page used to say. Ciro was not a wedding guest.)
Who Antonela is when she’s not in the stands
Antonela was born on February 26, 1988, in Rosario. She started dentistry at the National University of Rosario, switched to social communication and left university at 19. Since then she has built a career of her own as a model and brand partner, working with Adidas, Alo Yoga and the Argentine shoe label Ricky Sarkany, and with Stella McCartney. On Instagram, where she calls herself a digital creator, she has close to 42 million followers.
Here is my read: the old “she gave it all up for him” framing never fit. She moved with him, from Barcelona to Paris in 2021 and to Florida in July 2023, and she turned a life most people would find exhausting into a job. (Like Cristiano Ronaldo’s partner, Georgina Rodríguez, she is famous in her own right now.)
The Miami chapter
The family bought an $11 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, according to The Real Deal. Messi won Inter Miami’s first MLS Cup in December 2025, and in October 2025 the club announced he had extended his contract through the 2028 MLS season. “It makes me really happy to stay here and to continue with this project that, besides being a dream, has become a beautiful reality,” he said in the club statement. The boys are now 13, 11 and 8.
Summer 2026: a record, and a final that hurt
The 2026 World Cup was Messi’s last, and Antonela and the three boys were there in matching No. 10 shirts. When he scored against Austria in Arlington on June 22, his 17th World Cup goal and a new all-time tournament record, she wrote on Instagram: “What a privilege to see you make history again and again.” For his 39th birthday two days later she posted: “We already have everything we need because we have you.”
The ending was less kind. On July 19, Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium, on a Ferran Torres goal. Messi wrote that “the pain is immense and it’s going to take a long time for this wound to heal,” and added that this squad had reached two consecutive World Cup finals. Shakira, a guest at their wedding nine years earlier, headlined the final’s halftime show the same night. Football has a strange sense of humor.
My take
We usually tell this story as a fairy tale, but I think it’s better than that. It’s a story about two kids from the same Rosario neighborhood who kept showing up for each other, at a funeral, at a casino wedding, in a Texas stadium, after a lost final. The cousin’s kitchen turned out to be the most important place in Messi’s career.
Sources
- Antonela Roccuzzo on Instagram, October 2026
- Antonela Roccuzzo on Instagram (@antonelaroccuzzo)
- Lionel Messi on Instagram (@leomessi)
- Instagram post, January 2023
- FIFA: Spain 1-0 Argentina, final report (July 2026)
- NBC News: Messi and Inter Miami agree contract extension through 2028 (October 2025)
- The Daily Star: “The pain is immense,” says Messi after World Cup defeat (July 2026)
- HOLA!: Antonela Roccuzzo on Messi’s record World Cup goal (June 2026)
- NBC New York: 2026 World Cup final halftime show (July 2026)
- TODAY: Lionel Messi and Antonela Roccuzzo’s relationship timeline
- Gulf News / AFP: Messi, Roccuzzo get married in their hometown (June 2017)
- Goal: Who is Antonela Roccuzzo?
