Lionel Messi has spent two decades being claimed, argued over and idolised as the ultimate Argentine footballer. Now a genealogist says the family story is more complicated than that, and briefly ran through Brazil.
ONE reports on a three-year historical investigation, first published by the Brazilian outlet Globo, which traces part of Messi's maternal line to a stretch of São Paulo state more than a century before he was born in Rosario.
The research was carried out by the Italian historian Fiorenzo Santini, described as a banker by profession and a genealogist by passion, who began digging into the Messi and Cuccittini family surnames as the player rose to prominence at Barcelona.
According to the study, Messi's great-great-grandfather, Raniero Coccettini, left the town of San Severino Marche in Italy with his wife, Rosa Richezza, arriving in Brazil in 1899 through the port of Santos as part of the wave of Italian emigration to South America at the time.
The family is said to have settled and worked in the Ribeirão Preto area of São Paulo state for several years, where at least one child was reportedly born, before the household moved on to Rosario, Argentina, in the early 1900s.
The study's central claim is that Italian immigration officials in Brazil altered the family surname on arrival, and that further changes to the spelling followed after the move to Argentina — a common fate for Italian names processed through South American ports at the turn of the 20th century. That, according to the research, is how the family eventually came to be recorded as Cuccittini, the maiden name of Messi's mother, Celia.
The findings, as ONE notes, amount to a historical curiosity rather than a change of nationality: they raise the theoretical question of whether Messi's ancestry could have made him eligible to represent Brazil, without suggesting any such possibility was ever real or pursued.
Messi has never renounced or complicated his Argentine identity, which he affirmed most recently by lifting the World Cup with the albiceleste. His only acknowledged tie to the old country came in 2022, when the town of San Severino Marche — his father's ancestral home, separate from this newly reported maternal Brazilian episode — made him an honorary citizen.
Neither Messi nor his family have commented on the Globo research, and ONE's report, like the wider Brazilian coverage it draws on, presents the findings as the product of one historian's private archival work rather than an official genealogical record.
Still, the story has travelled fast, picked up by outlets from Brazil to the Gulf as a lighthearted footnote to a career that has otherwise been defined entirely by Argentina, Barcelona and Paris.
