Messi and the Giants Trades the Biopic for Orbs, Giants and a Realm Called Iko

Lionel Messi’s Disney+ cartoon finally showed its face in Málaga, and it skips Rosario, Barcelona and the trophies for a boy named Leo and ten tyrant giants.

Hall M at San Diego Comic-Con Málaga held more than 3,000 people on Friday, October 2, when Messi and the Giants finally stopped being a press rel and became something to look at. Executive producers Lacey Stanton and Bryan Korn of Sony Pictures Television, director Dan Creteur and Sony Music Vision’s Sergi Reitg took the stage to walk the crowd through the show’s myth, its characters and its music, then rolled the first teaser. Disney put the teaser trailer on YouTube the same day, and what it confirmed, more than anything, is that the long-promised Lionel Messi cartoon is not a Lionel Messi life story. It is a fantasy series about giants, powerful orbs and a boy who refuses to quit.

The venue was a statement of its own. Málaga hosts the first official San Diego Comic-Con edition outside the United States, and this year’s convention, only its second, ran October 1 to 4 at FYCMA, the city’s trade fair and congress center. For a series built by a Spanish studio, voiced by an Argentine actor and scored by an Argentine singer, a Spanish-speaking room was a pointed place to start.

Signal. What happened: Disney+ and Sony Pictures Television debuted the first teaser for the animated sports-fantasy series Messi and the Giants on October 2, 2026, along with its theme song and the actor voicing its lead. Exact object: Messi and the Giants, a CG-animated kids’ series executive produced by Lionel Messi, following a 12-year-old named Leo through the fractured realms of Iko, animated by Atlantis Animation, with the theme “Vamos, Vamos, Vamos” by Luck Ra and Milo Burgess-Webb as the voice of Leo. When and where: revealed at San Diego Comic-Con Málaga (October 1 to 4, FYCMA, Málaga, Spain); the series premieres globally on Disney+ in summer 2027 and airs on Disney Channel in the US, with no exact date set. Source: the official Disney+ press announcement of October 2, plus Sony’s original 2023 development announcement. Why it matters: one of the most recognizable athletes alive has put his name on a children’s fantasy rather than a life story, and the reveal shows how far the concept has traveled since it was pitched for a World Cup year it ended up missing.

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Disney’s official synopsis never mentions Rosario. It introduces Leo, a 12-year-old who becomes trapped in an alternate reality ruled by giants. To get home, he has to win high-stakes, soccer-like battles fought with powerful orbs, bring down a succession of legendary giants and stitch the fractured realms of Iko back together. The catch is written into the rules of that world. Every other competitor can tap what the press materials call “code powers” to supercharge their game, and Leo cannot, so he gets by on skill, teamwork and sheer stubbornness. Disney pitches the result as an underdog adventure about courage and perseverance.

Everything a biopic would lean on is missing. There is no childhood in Rosario, no growth hormone treatment, no move to Spain at 13, no Camp Nou, no night in Qatar. Lionel Messi is present as an executive producer and as a template, but the character on screen is a fictional boy who shares his first name and, by design, his size. Writing for Creative Bloq, Joe Foley observed that the link to the real footballer seems to stop at the name, a passing resemblance and a gift for kicking round objects, and the official copy does nothing to contradict him.

The connection runs through metaphor instead. When Disney picked up the series in December 2024, its logline closed by describing the only hero able to save Iko as no bigger than a flea, a deliberate nod to La Pulga, the nickname that has followed Messi since his early years. The same announcement tied the show’s themes to his experience of always being the smallest player on the team, which turns the orb rules into a fairly direct fable: a kid locked out of the shortcut everyone else uses, winning anyway. Messi’s own statement at the time was simpler. “Ever since I was a kid, I always loved animated series,” he said, adding that he looked forward to watching this one with his own children.

Milo Burgess-Webb, an Argentine actor, voices Leo. Disney’s announcement names no other cast members, and none of the giants who rule Iko’s ten realms have been named publicly yet.

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Sony first pitched the series at the MIPCOM television market in Cannes in October 2023, and the original announcement described a 12-year-old Messi confronting a string of obstacles while traveling through a video game on a quest to get home. Messi posted a first animated clip to his own Instagram on October 9 that year. Atlantis Animation, which made it, says the clip has since passed 50 million views, and the studio also completed a 90-second trailer that Sony unveiled to buyers in Cannes that month.

So the role-playing-game flavor of this week’s teaser is less a swerve than the original idea sharpened. The moral vocabulary hasn’t moved either: back in 2023, Joe D’Ambrosia of Sony Pictures Television Kids was already describing a show about perseverance, resilience, teamwork and believing in yourself, which is close to word for word what Disney’s 2026 copy promises. Two things did shift. The first is billing. In 2023 the hero was pitched as a young Messi himself; by the time Disney came aboard, he had become an ordinary 12-year-old named Leo with an extraordinary talent, a stand-in rather than an avatar. The second is vocabulary. The video game has hardened into a world with its own grammar of realms, orbs and giants, and the code-powers idea reads like a phrase that survived from the version where Leo was literally inside a game.

The modern Palacio de Ferias y Congresos in Málaga, featuring a striking curved facade and a vibrant, multi-colored woven canopy structure in the foreground.

The calendar moved as well. In late October 2023, Sergi Reitg and Fernando Cabral de Mello of Sony Music Latin Iberia told trade press they were talking to platforms about a global partner, wanted production underway in 2024 and expected a premiere at the end of 2025 or the start of 2026, which they pointedly called the World Cup year. Disney closed the deal in December 2024, with Ayo Davis, who runs its kids and family television business, framing the pickup around football’s standing as the world’s most beloved sport and its pull on a global young audience. The tournament has now come and gone, and the show lands in summer 2027. The episode count has grown along the way, too: Atlantis’s own project page lists 30 episodes of 22 minutes, where the 2023 plan described to trade press was 26. Even the release order has been reshuffled. The 2024 pickup announcement led with a Disney Channel premiere followed by Disney+, while this week’s announcement puts Disney+ first, worldwide, with Disney Channel carrying the series in the US.

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The look is being built in the Canary Islands. Atlantis Animation, a CG studio headquartered in Santa Cruz de Tenerife that bills itself as a premium shop for 2D and 3D series and features, has been on the project since 2023 as lead creative studio for graphic development and art treatment, and its own project page lists the job as full production, from storyboard and design through final delivery. The studio’s résumé includes season five of Miraculous and the series Tara Duncan, both slick, character-driven CG for young audiences, which squares with early write-ups describing the teaser as polished 3D with luminous effects and action choreography that borrows from anime. Creteur developed the show with executive producer Guy Toubes, whose credits include Odd Squad and Transformers: Robots in Disguise, and who oversees all of the writing.

The sound is coming from Córdoba. The theme song, “Vamos, Vamos, Vamos,” is recorded by Luck Ra, the stage name of Juan Facundo Almenara Ordóñez, who was born in Córdoba in 1999 and has built a career blending trap and urban pop with the cuarteto and cumbia his home province is known for. His own route into music ran through the video game Guitar Hero, which got him playing guitar as a kid, and by 2020 he was drawing a following as a Twitch streamer, a fitting résumé for a theme song attached to a show about a boy trapped inside a game world. His 2024 debut album, Que Nos Falte Todo, was released by Sony Music, and he has already written an official song for Argentina’s national team, “El Campeón.” Hiring him closes a loop Sony opened back in 2023, when the first announcement promised original music from the company’s own artists and composers.

A promotional graphic for the animated series “Messi and the Giants,” featuring a young soccer player mid-kick and a robotic soccer ball against a dark background.

That in-house logic runs straight through the credits. The executive producers include Kurt Mueller, Bryan Korn, Lacey Stanton and Guy Toubes for Sony Pictures Television, Afo Verde for Sony Music Latin Iberia, and Tom Mackay and Reitg for Sony Music Vision. With Sony Music supplying the theme and Sony’s television arm producing, Disney is effectively the buyer and broadcaster of a show Sony built.

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Japanese animation has been turning football into fantasy for more than four decades. Yoichi Takahashi’s Captain Tsubasa, serialized from 1981, made impossible shots and matches that sprawl across several episodes into a template, and Inazuma Eleven, which started life as a 2008 handheld role-playing game, built its whole identity around named special techniques. Messi and the Giants speaks that dialect fluently: game logic, power objects, a hero assembling a team to survive a hostile world.

Where it diverges is the interesting part. In Inazuma Eleven, the special move is the fantasy. In Iko, the hero is the one player locked out of the power system, and the show’s argument is that fundamentals beat shortcuts. That inversion lines up with the reputation Messi built over two decades, one founded on close control, balance and view rather than spectacle for its own sake, and it may be the most Messi details in the entire concept.

It is also a commercial hedge. A show that requires no knowledge of club football or the Copa América can reach children who have never sat through a full match, and Disney has said since 2024 that the series will be available in English, Spanish and many other languages. Football remains the hook; the fantasy is what lets it travel.

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Argentina lost the World Cup final to Spain on July 19, four years after Messi lifted the trophy in Qatar. The eight-time Ballon d’Or winner, playing his sixth World Cup, had captained the side all the way there. Weeks later his father and longtime agent, Jorge Messi, died in Rosario at 68 after a long illness, and on August 31 Messi announced on Instagram that he was retiring from the national team after 207 appearances and 125 goals. He wrote that he had drafted the letter two days after the final.

The series carries that year in its credits. Disney’s October announcement lists Lionel Messi Cuccittini and Jorge Messi Pérez, credited in memoriam, as executive producers, father and son side by side on a project the family’s management first signed onto in 2023. Messi still plays club football for Inter Miami, and he remains the name Disney leads with in every line of marketing, starting with the title.

What arrives next summer will be a show about a small boy who wins without the powers everyone else is handed, released roughly a year after its namesake’s last match for his country. Disney+ has scheduled Messi and the Giants for summer 2027 worldwide, with Disney Channel airing it in the US, and has not yet set a premiere date.