Ana Videla Sola Montoya remembers Argentina’s 2022 World Cup win fondly.
Four million people flooded the streets of her home city, Buenos Aires, she recalled. Argentina is a “very difficult country to be living in,” fraught with high rates of inflation and unhappiness, according to Montoya, an Emerson College student. But after the World Cup, “everyone was happy,” she said.
At the center of it all? Lionel Messi.
The international soccer sensation, argued by many as the greatest of all time, is the focus of many Argentinian football fans’ fervor.
“Messi is kind of like our God over there,” Montoya said.
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Revolution fans had better start praying. Messi will make a New England appearance Saturday evening, when his MLS club, Inter Miami, takes on the Revs, who sit at the bottom of 15 teams in the Eastern Conference standings. The 36-year-old — fresh off a $20.4 million-per-year contract with Miami — has brought unprecedented attention to professional soccer in the US, and especially in Boston, where football, baseball, and basketball reign.
Excitement around the big match, and Messi’s appearance, is mounting — especially among local fans with ties to Argentina, where Messi isn’t merely a soccer star, but a cultural hero.
“I’d die for that man, even though he doesn’t know me,” said Lao Mengelle, 24, who was born in Buenos Aires but moved to the US at a young age and now lives in the North End, working as an insurance broker.
Mengelle has a tattoo dedicated to Messi — an image of a “five of cups” tarot card, which is used in truco, a card game popular in South America. The tattoo commemorates when, before Argentina’s 2021 Copa America championship win against Brazil, Messi, playing the game with teammates, correctly guessed the five of cups before blindly pulling a card — an omen the team would go on to victory.
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After Argentina secured another international trophy in the 2022 World Cup, further fulfilling the “five of cups” prophecy, Mengelle got the symbol inked on his right arm.
“He brings me joy,” Mengelle said of Messi. “He also makes me very upset at times, watching him play. But I’ve always been a fan of him, will always support him no matter what he does, and he’s just a shining light for our country at all times.”
Arlo Valiela, another fan with Argentinian roots, said he follows Messi’s career “wherever he goes.”
Valiela, a Northeastern University student and data analyst, was a Barcelona FC fan growing up because of Messi, bonding over games with his grandfather and other family members. When Messi played at Paris Saint-Germain FC, he tracked that team, too. And since Messi signed his MLS contract, likely to close out his professional career in the US, Valiela has kept tabs on Inter Miami as well — even though he follows the MLS only “casually,” he said.
“If you ask me one Revolution game I care about this year, I care about this one,” Valiela said.
For Valiela, the connection between being Argentinian and being a Messi fan is “one to one,” he said. “It’s so inherent.”
Although Valiela doesn’t consider himself “one of the crazy ones,” he said, Messi fandom is ingrained in his personal and family life.
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“Whenever I get the chance to see or support or watch, that’s something that I really enjoy doing,” Valiela said. “I’m just beneath [the level of] face paint and screaming at a TV.”
These fans aren’t the only ones excited about Messi. His appearance has generated “unprecedented levels of interest,” said Cathal Conlon, vice president of marketing and fan engagement for the New England Revolution.
Saturday’s game is expected to sell out all 65,000 seats in Gillette Stadium, slated to set the record for the highest-attended Revolution game — a stark jump from the usual attendance at Revolution games, which falls somewhere in range of 26,000 fans, Conlon said.
Demand is high, and the few tickets left aren’t cheap. Typically, tickets to a regular season match sell in the $20 range. On Ticketmaster as of Friday, the cheapest seats for the game against Messi are going for around $250 — and those are the nosebleeds.
“I’ve never seen a Revolution game with that sort of pricing on the secondary market,” Conlon said. “It has been just off the charts since the schedule was released.”
Conlon said interest in the Revolution has been on the rise in the past five years, during which the club has seen a 43 percent growth in attendance. An uptick in sales for season tickets, multi-game packages, and individual games because of Messi’s spot on the schedule has certainly added “gas on that fire,” Conlon said.
And the Revolution is doing everything it can to retain new fans.
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“It’s a missed opportunity if we don’t take this 65,000-person crowd and at least convert some of the people in attendance into regular Revolution fans,” Conlon said.
Some local fans will skip out on the big crowds Saturday and instead gather in homes and restaurants to enjoy authentic Argentinian food and watch Messi with friends and family.
Che! Empanada, a restaurant with locations in Worcester and Newton, will stream the game on its in-house televisions and offer special deals for the occasion (buy six empanadas, get two free).
Owner Albie Alvarez-Cote said the restaurant even serves an empanada called “the Messi” — beef, bacon, and cheddar cheese wrapped and baked in homemade dough.
“It’s a favorite,” Alvarez-Cote, 58, said. “Argentinians adore him.”
Even though she has been loyal to the Revolution, having served empanadas to players at club events, Alvarez-Cote thinks the home team will forgive her for cheering against them, just this once — after all, how could she not root for Messi?
“[For] Argentinians, you are almost born into your team ... Football is a way of life,” she said. “It’s in the blood, the soccer.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Cathal Conlon, vice president of marketing and fan engagement for the New England Revolution.
Madeline Khaw can be reached at maddie.khaw@globe.com. Follow her @maddiekhaw.