Dave Hannigan: Messi’s bodyguard catching the eye with his continuous shadow play

When Popeye O’Neill ran the line during club matches in the Cork county championships, it was hard to take your eyes off him.

With a distinctive straight-backed running style, especially when moving backwards at great pace, the cartoonish blur of his legs made it look like somebody had pressed rewind on a video of a linesman at work.

A GAA stalwart, many in the crowd would have known him from his day job with Bus Éireann at the transport hub in Parnell Place, the rest just savoured the way this roadrunner in reverse officiated, trundling up and down the whitewash, a profile in diligence, often providing an entertaining sideshow within the show.

Popeye died last year but, bizarrely, he comes to mind during every Major League Soccer match involving Lionel Messi.

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In between the Argentinian’s trademark magic cameos there are plenty leisurely intervals where he merely saunters with intent, and that downtime is when our eyes stray away from the action toward a curious, shaven-headed man with a hirsute beard stalking the sidelines.

Neither an assistant-referee nor a coach of either team, Yassine Cheuko is a bodyguard charged with protecting the number 10 at all times, even when he’s on the field of play.

Wearing an Inter Miami polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms, he drifts in and out of camera shot but when he’s in the frame, bizarrely, you find yourself watching him watching the stadium for potential danger. A 21st century Kevin Costner to Messi’s Whitney Houston.

In the 73rd minute of Inter Miami’s recent visit to Los Angeles FC, Cheuko demonstrated exactly why MLS afforded him the type of pitchside access usually reserved for players, coaching staff, and match officials.

A demented young fella, wearing an old Barcelona number 10 with Messi on the back, suddenly sprinted out from behind one goal and ran towards his hero in the middle of the park. Just as he got close enough to touch him, the ever-vigilant Cheuko, having come in from the sideline at top speed, intercepted the besotted lad and put him in a chokehold until stadium security came to carry him off. And, as he so often does in America, Messi looked on, bemused. The face of a man wondering exactly what he has got himself into here.

This was merely the latest Cheuko clip to go viral over the last couple of months, as people have taken more and more notice of the burly, unsmiling character always lurking in the background of so much Messi footage.

Here he is clearing a path as the footballer is leaving a restaurant with his family and struggling to get to his car. There he is strutting off the team bus alongside Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba et al, blending in perfectly apart from his eyes busily scanning all before him.

Everywhere Messi stops to sign autographs, Cheuko is on his shoulder, panning the crowd, only an earpiece away from being a member of the secret service detail working the presidential beat.

His own profile has been enhanced by the insatiable appetite for Messi-related stories and there is a certain mystique surrounding his ubiquitous shadow.

Initially, it was suggested, some say by Inter Miami as a scare tactic, that Cheuko was a former Navy Seal who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. An excellent calling card for a celebrity security guard except military types quickly exposed that for being utterly fictitious.

Equally outlandish is the claim made by some excitable media outlets that he is being paid $3m a year to have Messi’s back. His salary is more reliably reported to be (a still very tidy) $250,000.

Most of what is known about Cheuko is what has been gleaned from his own social media profile. Born and raised in California, father from Morocco, mother from France, he is a mixed martial artist who did some training in Paris and fought Muay Thai bouts in Thailand. We know this because he posted videos of those encounters.

A lot of his postings are the sort of guff put out by ripped physical fitness influencers looking to promote themselves. There are plenty of preening shots of his impressive six pack, videos of him kicking the heavy bag, punching sparring partners, and dragging truck tyres. A cynic might call it the online persona of a dollar store Conor McGregor.

“The strong man is not the good wrestler or good boxer,” declares Cheuko’s Instagram profile, “the strong man is only the one who controls himself when he is angry.”

All of this was put there before he hooked up with Messi, his appointment apparently the brainchild of David Beckham, the Inter owner, and somebody who knows well that a lot of Americans can trample across personal boundaries when they get the mere whiff of a celebrity.

There’s a reason why so many athletes, from golfers to NBA players, now spend money having bodyguards lurking around them at various junctures. In some instances, NFL clubs have annual contracts with security outfits like Players Protect, specifically established to cash in on the growing market for these services.

Once Messi signed for Miami, there were some ill-informed articles positing the view that he chose to play in the United States because, despite the fact he’s been on television ads for years here, he would be able to walk around the place unrecognised and unmolested. Cheuko’s presence indicates otherwise.