Man, I remember that day. December 18th, 2022. I was sitting there, heart pounding, convinced Argentina was going to choke somehow, even after the penalties were done. Then it happened. Messi walked up to the trophy, looked at it like it was the only thing that mattered in the whole damn universe, and just kissed it. Not a celebratory smash kiss, but a proper, tender, slow kiss. And then the floodgates opened—not just for the Argentinian fans, but for everyone. People I know who don’t even watch football were bawling.
I saw the reaction unfold on Twitter, Reddit, everywhere. It wasn’t just happiness. It was this deep, primal release. I kept seeing the same question: “Why the hell am I crying?” That’s where my brain kicked in. I thought, I need to figure this out. I need to document the anatomy of this global emotional explosion. This wasn’t just a sports moment; it was something about the human condition, and I had to pin it down.
The Deep Dive: Harvesting Internet Tears
My first step in this “practice” was pure immersion. I didn’t use any fancy AI tools or sentiment analysis software. Nope. I decided to be the human algorithm. I basically locked myself in my office for three days, fueled by bad coffee and the goal of figuring out what made people tick in that precise 30-second window.
I started hitting the major platforms hard. Forget the news sites; they only capture the headline. I needed the raw, unfiltered stuff. I focused entirely on Reddit threads (r/soccer, r/fifa, and surprisingly, r/AskReddit threads about emotional breakdowns), and the YouTube comment sections of high-quality clips focusing solely on the trophy presentation.
I used search terms like “Messi crying,” “Messi finally,” and “why am I emotional.” The result? A monstrous, disorganized wall of text. I was copying and pasting thousands of comments into a massive text document—just grabbing the paragraphs, ignoring the one-word cheers. My file was named “*.” It was a mess, but the data was gold.
Sifting the Sentiments: Categorizing the Sob Stories
The next phase was the actual hard work: organizing the mess. I printed out about fifty pages of these raw reactions and started color-coding them manually. I realized quickly that the tears weren’t uniform. They fell into distinct emotional categories. I had to construct these buckets:
- The Weight of Expectation/Relief: These were the fans who had lived through four previous failed attempts. They cried because the burden was finally lifted. They wrote things like: “I’ve been holding my breath since 2006. I can finally exhale.”
- The Narrative of Struggle (The Projection): This was the biggest group. People were comparing Messi’s 20-year journey—the defeats, the retirements, the criticism—to their own struggles in life. They cried because they saw their own eventual, hoped-for success in his success. One person commented: “He proved that if you keep trying, even after everyone tells you you’re done, you can make it.”
- The Generational Connection: These were the older fans or those watching with their fathers. They talked about Maradona, the ghosts of the past, and the sense of absolute closure. “My dad cried like a baby. We watched it together, and it felt like the end of an era.”
- Purity of Emotion (The Kiss Itself): This bucket was small but intense. People reacted directly to the physical act of the kiss—it wasn’t arrogance, it was pure, unadulterated love for the game and the goal. They felt the tenderness.
I spent days cross-referencing these groups, pulling out the strongest quotes, trying to find the common denominator. What I uncovered wasn’t complicated: people weren’t crying over a football match; they were crying over a perfectly executed human story arc. They were crying over validation.
The Final Takeaway: Why I Know This Stuff
So, I compiled this huge study of human emotion, and I finally got my answer: everyone cried because Messi’s long road was a reflection of their own long, messy battles that haven’t yet paid off. The kiss was the moment the universe finally paid its debt.
Why did I dedicate this much energy to dissecting internet fan reactions? I’ll tell you. About six months before that World Cup final, I walked out of the biggest, best-paying job I ever had. Massive logistics firm, 80 hours a week, and a boss who treated us like dirt. I just snapped. Gave my two weeks and left. I was unemployed, anxious, and felt like a complete failure. I had achieved what society called “success,” and it broke me.
I needed a low-stakes project to prove to myself that I could still analyze, categorize, and complete a task, even if the task was documenting global crying fits. I needed to prove I hadn’t lost my ability to focus. This whole process of diving into the emotion and finding the structure behind the chaos was literally my therapy session. It helped me see that even the greatest successes come after years of getting knocked down. So, yeah, I spent a week analyzing why people cried over Messi, but really, I was analyzing why I wasn’t crying over my own life yet. And that’s why I know the data is real.