The highly anticipated and most hyped Kolkata visit of Lionel Messi’s G.O.A.T India Tour 2025 went haywire on Saturday at the Salt Lake Stadium. Lionel Messi, who arrived a little earlier than the scheduled time at around 11:15 am, left after merely 20 minutes, unlike the initially scheduled 45, thus leaving his eagerly waiting fans disappointed.
Trouble ensued when Lionel Messi failed to complete a lap of honour, thus resulting in unrest in the crowd. Broken chairs, throwing of bottles, and damage to the stage came in the way as the police attempted to tackle the situation, finally resorting to baton charges. The event organiser, Satadru Dutta, has been arrested at Kolkata Airport, with talks of a full refund reportedly underway. To add to the chaos, political personalities, government officials, their relatives, and influencers were spotted around Lionel Messi, thus making the situation worse for crowd management.
Speaking exclusively to News Ei Samay, Indian professional football manager and former player, Lalkamal Bhowmick, stated that it is not the first instance when such a massive crowd has been witnessed.
‘Crowd size wasn't new, but the chaos was’
“When Diego Maradona came here in 2011, the crowd was pretty much the same as today," Bhowmick remembered. "Maradona played with us, hugged us. But even on that occasion, the crowd didn’t enter the ground as they did today. We, ourselves, didn’t know how things went out of our control.”
‘Fans came just to get a glimpse of Messi’
“Messi is a very grounded person," he said. “Extraordinary individuals are typically very ordinary people. The way he is on the pitch, after a miraculously performed dribble or even a bad tackle, there's no change. He is the same here. We signed autographs and hugged him. He did not look irked or irritated at all.”
Bhowmick said, "Fans had invested heavily to even get a glimpse of the Argentine legend." “People spent thousands to be here. They didn’t come to watch a match; they came to see Messi,” he said. “If Messi, Luis Suárez and Rodrigo De Paul had been taken around in convertible cars, it might have helped. People just wanted to see them properly. The planning and crowd management could definitely have been better.”
Shah Rukh Khan reportedly unable to enter stadium amid chaos
He furthermore said that he came to know that Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan had been waiting outside the stadium for almost half an hour, following which he left without entering the stadium. “This once again shows how much better the coordination should have been,” he said.
‘Better planning could have saved the day’
In the course of Messi’s departure, the frustration that had been mounting inside the stadium. “The stadium erupted in anger,” Bhowmick said once more, identifying a problem with the management.
"It’s a matter of planning. This is a situation that might never have happened if plans had been made to control the crowd better." And as the inquiry continues, with talk of a refund, Kolkata is left to ponder a day which was supposed to go down in history but has instead been a learning curve of how fragile magic can be when management fails.
