Although it might not be as permanent as a tattoo or a statue, Lionel Messi has recently been celebrated in another way in his home country of Argentina.
The World Cup champion’s face recently showed up in a 124-acre cornfield in the South American city of Córdoba. According to Reuters, an image of Messi’s face was created by plugging an algorithm into a seeding machine, so it would plant the seeds in an exact pattern to create Messi’s portrait when the seeds grew into corn stalks.
A farming engineer named Carlos Faricelli was the one who created the code. He gave it to farmer Maximiliano Spinazze who sowed the seeds himself.
“When this corn grows and you take an aerial shot, where the plants are closer together and the ground is less visible, a more intense green contrasts with where there are fewer plants,” Faricelli explained. “Then, this kind of agricultural art is created.”
Faricelli also said he created the algorithm as a “tribute” to Messi and is willing to share it with other farmers who are interested in designing a Messi image in their own corn fields. Spinazze said he decided to form the crop pattern as a celebration of Argentina’s World Cup victory last month.
“For me, Messi is unbeatable,” Spinazze said. “Now they are world champions, I am delighted this can be expressed by planting the crop.”
Many Messi fans were impressed with how the artistic endeavor turned out. “This is really wow,” one Twitter user wrote. “This takes a lot more than artistry of a tattoo artist or care [from] a barber with his razor.”
Others joked that maybe it wasn’t a farmer who actually created the corny portrait. “Wow, these aliens must be fans of Messi,” one tweet read.
While there’s nothing otherworldly going on with the Messi cornfield, we’re sure that if aliens did exist in other galaxies, those extraterrestrials would easily be Lionel Messi fans. Intelligent life, amirite?