Leo Messi Donates to Médecins Sans Frontières

After receiving compensation for a lawsuit, Leo Messi has donated $85,000 to ‘Doctors Without Borders’.

On July 7 of last year, Lionel Messi won a libel case against newspaper La Razon, who had published an article by Alfonso Ussia making false claims about the Barcelona player doping, Marca reported.

After a year with the case on ‘stand by’, it’s only now that the Argentine international has finally been awarded a fee of more than $85,000 after winning the case.

In a column which called Messi “lazy” and criticized him for “undeservedly” winning the award for best player at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Ussía argued that the reason Messi played so “badly” was that he was no longer doping. The author made the accusation with seemingly no real basis.

Messi did take growth hormones when he was a child to treat a medical condition which made him have lower levels than normal. He was given treatment to return his levels to normal, again when he was a child, but those were discontinued afterwards. There is no evidence that he, or FC Barcelona or Argentina, broke any rules in his treatment.

‘Doctors Without Borders’, known as Médecins Sans Frontières in their home country of France, is an NGO known for employing over 30,000 people - most of them doctors, nurses, sanitation experts, and so on - mostly in war-torn regions and developing countries affected by disease. About 90% of their funding comes from private donations such as this.

The Barcelona superstar has funded the construction of 20 classrooms in war-torn Syria before. He has been an ambassador for Unicef since 2010 and has previously called for an end to the war in Syria, calling it “heartbreaking”.

The donation was made to Unicef through Argentine’s Leo Messi Foundation and has allowed more than 1,600 children to continue to be educated in “adequately furnished classrooms” according to Spanish sports daily.

The classrooms are also fully equipped with solar panels to provide the children with the best possible learning environment despite the on-going conflict in the country, which has lasted six years.