What Happened To Messi’s Sports Drink? 🥤

I just spent a full MLB game day as a hot dog vendor, and I wasn’t expecting it to be as hard as it was. Sure, I knew that it would be a little physically demanding, but the level of performance the job takes is severely underrated.

I’ll explain more at the end.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: What Are The Patches Pro Athletes Are Wearing?

📉 Biggest Loser: What Happened To Messi’s Sports Drink?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: Inside Jayden Daniels’ High-Tech Practice Advantage

What are these patches that professional athletes are wearing all over their bodies?

Well, it turns out, I might have just stumbled into one of the most controversial products on the internet that nobody seems to know anything about.

First Sighting: I recently saw this video of a tennis player at Wimbledon with a strange patch below his belly button, and the woman who posted this video said that this patch uses something called “light signaling recovery to support your body’s natural recovery,” so obviously I decided to look into what that actually means.

Strange Science: What she’s referring to is called a LifeWave patch, and according to the product site, it utilizes a type of science called “phototherapy” to improve the health of the person wearing it. It apparently does this by using the infrared heat emitted from your body, trapping it inside one of these quarter-sized patches and then reflecting it back inward to “activate the Power of Your Stem Cells,” which in turn can apparently help improve almost every aspect of health, like:

But does it actually work?

False Claims: Well, since these patches claim to stimulate stem sells, in 2023, a real stem cell researcher decided to analyze the research papers and clinical trials that existed on the product, and found that not only did none of the research papers provide sufficient evidence to back up any of the product’s vague claims but the “clinical studies” that LifeWave links to had what this researcher considered to be “questionable or unclear methods” and weren’t published anywhere reputable.

Still, that hasn’t stopped LifeWave from selling a pack of these things for $150. Which you might think is why their revenue grew 20-fold between 2019 and 2024 from $20 million to an astonishing $400 million per year.

But there’s actually a different reason for that:

Instead, when you do a bit more digging, you’ll find that LifeWave is actually just a Multi-Level Marketing scheme whose top-level participants have received complaints from the FTC, as recently as this year, over allegations that they used “false or baseless earning claims to recruit workers, most of whom did not earn any money”

I guess the placebo effect is real.

What the heck happened to Messi’s sports drink, Más+?

Because less than two years after launching, the brand has already gone out of business, but the reason why is actually a lot simpler than you might think.

Idea Launch: On June 13, 2024, Messi made international headlines when he announced that he would be launching something called a “positive hydration drink” to compete with some of the biggest companies on the planet.

And early on, it seemed like it was going to be an instant success, since the drink launched directly into Walmart and Publix and was partnered with the same company behind White Claw and Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

In fact, immediately following the Más+ launch, industry experts predicted that the drink would be “hugely successful” due in large part to Messi being arguably the most famous person on the planet… so what happened?

Messy Messi: Almost right away, Messi’s company got into a legal battle with Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime Hydration over what they alleged were Más+ using the same design, colors, and even bottle caps from the same manufacturer, as well as ripping off Prime’s slogan.

Even though this lawsuit was quietly settled by January 2026, to me, it actually reveals the exact problem that caused the eventual downfall of Más+. Just like Prime, which has seen its sales drop by nearly 80% in the past year, Más+ didn’t actually do anything that unique.

Missed Opportunity: Sure, the brand claimed to be high in electrolytes while being low in sugar and calories, but so does nearly every other sports drink on the market these days. The only difference is, brands like Gatorade and BODYARMOR already have a loyal following of repeat purchasers.

Instead, as one industry expert pointed out, the success of Más+ would be determined by “authenticity” on Messi’s behalf, which, as it turns out, was hard to accomplish for one of the most reserved celebrities on the planet.

So basically, Messi tried to compete directly with a company, Prime, that was already failing, but because he’s one of the most reserved athletes in the world, after the initial launch, no one came back to buy the drink a second time.

Honestly, I feel like more people should have seen this coming.

What the heck is Jayden Daniels wearing during practice?

Well, even though it just looks like a regular VR headset, it actually helps solve one of the oldest problems in football that no one seems to know anything about.

It’s been well reported that Daniels has been using a VR headset to practice since his Heisman season at LSU, but on the most recent season of Quarterback, we got our first-ever look at how he actually uses it, and it’s actually way more useful than I thought it would be.

Not Just Any VR: Now, the program Daniels is using is developed by a company out of Germany that first created this immersive simulation technology to allow top soccer players to get extra reps after practice. However, Daniels describes the football version as a “more realistic” version of Madden, where his coaches can upload a full library of offensive and defensive plays so he can see all of the potential schemes, coverages and alignments he might face that week or even just where the play clocks are in a new stadium.

Daniels also wears headphones so he can hear recordings of play calls from his offensive coordinator just like he’ll hear them during the game to make the immersion even greater.

But to make things even more difficult, Daniels says that he’s requested that these simulations run at a faster speed than what he’ll see in a game, meaning from the time he receives the play, he only has 7 seconds to analyze the defense, snap the ball and make his read.

Improvement Tracking: Every aspect of his performance in the simulation will then be tracked on an iPad, ranging from the number of interceptions he throws to how fast he scans the field, to ensure that he’s improving throughout the week and ready for the game.

Still, by far, the most useful part of this headset is actually when Daniels isn’t preparing for a game.

For example, last season, as he spent time rehabilitating his knee and elbow, he was still able to get in realistic mental reps without putting extra wear and tear on his body. This tech has also proven helpful for his backups, who struggle to get any reps in practice throughout the week and who, up until now, had no real way to prepare for a game besides sitting around and watching.

Why doesn’t every team have one of these things?

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

During my recent vending shift at Wrigley, I met some of the most interesting people in sports. You had Hopper, the 78-year-old vendor who got his nickname for jumping over seats, and Mark “the singing vendor” who can perform any beer-related parody song your heart desires.

And although I thought that the hardest part of the job would be the physical exertion (trust me, I was still sweating by the end of it), the really draining part was putting on what felt like a performance for several hours.

This is one of my favorite “day in the life” videos I’ve made; make sure to check it out if you haven’t already!