This article originally appeared on VICE Sports.According to various reports, police in Peru have seized well over a tonne of cocaine worth around $91m, with each package branded with a picture of Lionel Messi. Clearly marketed at those of us who want to stay up until four in the morning talking shit about tiki-taka – as opposed to, say, the failure of the system or, and chop me out another line pal, how shallow everyone is these days – this frankly silly amount of toot now looks set to be poured down a Peruvian toilet somewhere.While Messi is no doubt a salesman's dream and cocaine has to be marketed like any other product, attempting to exploit the overlap between football fans and gak fiends seems a bit arbitrary, to be honest. Yes, we all know a friend who wants to extol the virtues of 4-1-3-2 during the sesh, who is literally ruining the sesh for everyone by going on about Pep Guardiola's tactical flexibility and how he got the best out of Messi as an unorthodox false nine, but these people represent a rare breed of packet monster, and are not realistically going to be able to consume anything up to 1,400 kilos of cocaine alone.
That means that, even had this batch of Messi-branded bizzo escaped the clutches of the Peruvian authorities, much of the effort that went into marketing it would have been lost on unappreciative nostrils. This cocaine could only truly have been savoured by a select group of football fans – the trequartistas, the registas, the fantasistas of the sesh, if you will. For everyone else, the packaging would have been just another obstacle on the path to an abundance of dopamine, an inconvenience to be torn to shreds before the hungry hoovering might begin. If anything, this reminds us of the ultimate futility of the sesh, as does the near certainty that Lionel Messi and his representatives would not approve of his image being used in this way.** Legal disclaimer.