Lionel Messi

If you watched the Milan derby this past weekend, you may have seen this olive tree ceremony before the game.

The Milan derby was the latest game to see the ceremony take place. Photo: @waatp | Twitter

Remember this kid? The one with the heart-wrenching Messi jersey made out of a plastic bag? Well, now that your heart has been wrenched, prepare for it to be warmed.

Lots of people have been working to find this kid. After a hiccup or two, it looks like they've found him. And now a meeting with Lionel Messi himself is in the works.

The little boy's name is Murtaza Ahmadi. He's five years old and lived in a small village in Afghanistan.

Lionel Messi is unique among athletes in that there are lots of people who think it's totally worth getting arrested just to be a little nearer to him. American sports don't see near the amount of fans running on to fields that soccer does, especially in regards to Messi. One young fan appeared to have made the most of his pitch-invaderdom following Barcelona's game against Malaga, hugging Messi and ending up with a game-worn Messi jersey.

And then the security guards decided to keep the Messi jersey for themselves.

There are many Lionel Messi fans out there. Millions, certainly. Billions, possibly. A little harder to find are LIONEL MESSI FANS, who only pop up once in a blue moon. Via the Internet, we encountered one such gentleman today.

This LIONEL MESSI FAN had the good fortune to receive an opportunity to acquire the best soccer player in the world's autograph. So what did he have Messi sign? His back, right next to his gigantic Messi tattoo, featuring two of Messi's trophies: the 2012 Copa del Rey trophy and the 2015 Copa del Rey trophy.

Messi cannot break the laws of physics. As much as some of his fans love to say that he does, and as magical as his talent may seem, it is physically impossible for him to break the laws of physics. It is impossible for all of us, independent of some sort of incredible technology, to break the laws of physics. With a ball at his feet, Messi must obey the same laws as everyone else in the world. He just happens to be the best in the world at pushing those laws to their very limits. He can put the ball wherever he wants, curve it however he wants, but how does he do it?

Remember the adorable little boy who made a Messi jersey out of a plastic bag and then went viral on the internet? If reports from various media organizations, most notably Sky News, are to be believed, his identity has been discovered at record speed even for the web.

A Kurdish television station is claiming to have found the boy, identified by them as a boy named Hamid, who lives in Dohuk, Kurdistan, in Iraq.

They showed him with a new(er) Barcelona number 10 jersey, ostensibly Messi's.

Sunday marks what could be the end of an era, as the NFL sees two of its greatest players face off for likely the final time: Brady vs Manning.

NFL fans around the world should realize how lucky they've been to have watched two of football's greatest players. (The same thing said of David Bowie by Twitter's @JeSuisDean holds true for this rivalry: "If you're ever sad, just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as Brady vs Manning.")

Sometimes we forget how truly global soccer's reach is, how extremely footballing superstars have burrowed into the global consciousness. Then we see a picture of a toddler (here we are just guessing) Messi fan wearing a plastic bag painted to look like a Lionel Messi Argentina jersey.