The incredible World Cup match between Argentina and Egypt earlier this week will be remembered for ages: a stunning last-minute comeback that saw Lionel Messi extend his record as the competition’s all-time leading goal scorer and sent the defending champions into Saturday night’s quarterfinals against Switzerland.
But the thriller on the field was also a prelude to something much bigger—and much darker. Within hours of the final whistle, an antisemitic conspiracy theory was born. The idea that began galloping across the internet was that a cabal including Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad, Lionel Messi, Argentine president Javier Milei, and FIFA conspired to rig the game for the Argentine team. The “evidence” consisted of nothing more than photos of Messi posing with Israeli officials and praying at the Western Wall more than a decade ago, plus a few pictures of Milei with Netanyahu.
Even among the conspiratorially minded, this was pretty thin stuff. What the theory lacked was a FIFA component, something that would link the nebulous Israel-Argentina connection to the game itself. So, just like that, one was invented: a baseless claim that the game’s referee, François Letexier, was Jewish.
