In Paris this evening, in a glittering 19th-century opera house on the banks of the Seine, Lionel Messi won the Ballon d’Or trophy for the best male footballer in the world. Again.
If you follow the game, this is not exactly news. He’s been the best for the better part of two decades now. This is his eighth Ballon d’Or, three more than any other player in history, one more than any other entire country, and voters probably should have given him a few more.
For some fans, though, this one is special. To 46 million Argentinians, the award celebrates the World Cup triumph he led his country to in December, elevating him to national sainthood alongside Diego Maradona and ending any lingering debate about who is the sport’s greatest-ever player.
GO DEEPER
Messi, Bonmati named Ballon d’Or winners
To a much smaller, admittedly sicker contingent of us, Messi’s eighth Ballon d’Or is cause for celebration because it is — technically, sort of, even though this happened too late to factor into the voting — the first to go to a player who is presently employed by Major League Soccer.
Until this summer, the odds of that occurring would have been astronomical, like finding out from a Michelin Guide that the world’s finest beluga caviar is served in paper cones out of a roadside hot dog stand in Fort Lauderdale.
The United States may lead the world in some things but our domestic football league is not generally considered one of them. MLS doesn’t even lead the country in the category of being called a football league. Let’s stick with ‘soccer’, cool?
So anyway, the best soccer player of all time plays in Florida now, in a competition that’s not even as old as he is, for a team that played its inaugural season during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is all super weird. It should also be, by all rights, a big honking deal in the wide world of sports.
He’s a global icon in a massively popular game that’s been just about to break through in the good ol’ U. S. of A. for the last, oh, hundred years or so. He’s also incredibly fun to watch.
But when it’s all said and done, what will Lionel Messi mean to America? In dogged pursuit of a question that could transform the cultural landscape, I did what any journalist would: I begged my editors to send me to the beach.
Messi guided Argentina to the 2022 World Cup (David Ramos – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
Messi Mania
Friends, I have rowed into the hurricane that is Messi Mania and survived to tell you what is coming for America.
It’s coming in pink cowboy hats, in midnight black La Noche kits and electric pink feather boas strung with twinkling fairy lights. It’s carried on a wind of South American football songs, fueled by stadium cafe con leche and club-themed empanadas dyed the unfortunate colour of a sick flamingo. It is a celebration of the miraculous arrival of the greatest player who ever kicked a ball to the very worst team in Major League Soccer, and — at least for anyone who can afford to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to watch football that’s often silly and sometimes sublime — there’s no ticket like it in sports.
A couple of points of clarification before we get going. First of all, when I talk about Messi, I’m also talking a lot of the time about Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba, two former Barcelona team-mates who signed with Inter Miami at the same time he did. They’re incredible players in their own right, worthy of praise, but they won’t get a lot of mention here, because it gets cumbersome to name them all the time and they’ve played with Messi for so long and mind-melded with him so completely that they’re more or less a single organism at this point.
GO DEEPER
Celebrating Sergio Busquets - the invisible genius impossible to ignore
The other thing is that even though this article talks a lot about MLS, it’s often really talking about the Leagues Cup, which is technically not MLS but also sort of is for boring reasons that we’ll get into later. This distinction is not important to figuring out what Messi means. It did not occupy my thoughts on the beach.
The deal with Messi, even more than most athletes, is that you can’t separate the idea of him from the player on the pitch. His civilian life appears to consist almost entirely of doing dad stuff and sometimes (this one made headlines) going grocery shopping. On any kind of philosophical level, Messi doesn’t mean anything; he’s just a shy 36-year-old gazillionaire who does things with a ball no other human can.
Weeks after his arrival in the United States, when he finally speaks to the press for the first time, The Athletic will ask whether he feels a responsibility as an ambassador for the world’s game in this country, and he’ll mumble that he hasn’t really thought about it. “I came here to play, to continue enjoying football,” he says.
So I watch him play. This would, admittedly, be easier if Inter Miami’s temporary stadium, which sits about an hour north of actual Miami and was only meant to house the expansion club for a couple of years until they can build a permanent home, hadn’t been designed with a large black pillar smack dab in the middle of the press box window, directly in front of my assigned seat.
Here’s how the game goes: the pink guys appear from behind the pillar via what I can only assume was Busquets-related magic, Messi plays a line-breaking pass that makes everyone’s eyeballs go a-woo-ga out of their skulls, and then the visiting team snatch the ball off somebody and fly away behind the pillar to do… who knows what. I decide to step outside.
Messi has provided a commercial boost to U.S. soccer (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Out in the Florida night, the heavy ocean air drapes itself around your shoulders like a wet towel. The heat is so thick it has a taste. It’s astonishing that anyone down on the pitch can move. Unlike the first generation of MLS stadiums, this one is built specifically for soccer — compact, almost cosy — so even from up in the farthest corner, you can see how Messi’s shirt clings damply to his skin as he wanders around like an unattended toddler looking for trouble.
He walks for a long time. The ball rolls to him in the centre circle, where he’s standing around looking bored, and suddenly he springs to life like some kind of wind-up toy, zipping away into the final third on choppy little steps and sending a team-mate into the box with a gloriously weighted pass off the outside of his boot.
That’s the easy part. The part that makes no sense no matter how many times you watch it is how, after he gets rid of the ball, Messi can veer into a clump of five defenders and arrive wide open in front of goal at exactly the right instant to tap the return pass into the net. Seriously, how? He’s the one guy everyone in the stadium is watching and he can just, like, disappear.
There are three basic things a soccer player can do with the ball: dribble, pass or shoot. Most pros are good at one of these, maybe two if they’re lucky. Messi does all three with mind-bending skill — not just better than everyone around him, but quite possibly better than anyone, anywhere, ever. He sees things no one else does and he does things no one has ever seen.
Throw in his peculiar genius for off-ball movement, the way he strolls around studying the opponent so he can materialise in a few critical yards of space at the last possible second, and you get a player so casually untouchable that he makes even the best defenders in the world reconsider some life choices.
Let’s just be honest here: Major League Soccer does not have the best defenders in the world. The league has come a long way in its comparatively brief 27 years, and by most measures, it’s now pushing the top dozen or so domestic soccer competitions in the world, but it’s still miles behind European powers such as the English Premier League, which American fans can just as easily watch if they want.
GO DEEPER
Lionel Messi: The evolution of the greatest footballer of all time
Even though the competitive gap between them is shrinking, MLS gets steamrolled in U.S. TV ratings by Mexico’s Liga MX, and it hasn’t even cracked the national sports conversation yet against the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball.
Some clubs — mostly newer ones — have managed to build big, passionate local fan bases anyway. Inter Miami aren’t one of them.
For years before the expansion club was officially announced, the Cuban-American billionaire majority owner Jorge Mas tried to negotiate a splashy new stadium in the heart of Miami that would be unveiled with some razzle-dazzle from minority co-owner and face of the franchise David Beckham, of Manchester United, Real Madrid and married-a-Spice-Girl fame. Instead, the club wound up making its debut in the next county over in February 2020, a few weeks before the whole world shut down, and had to play most of its first season with no fans.
Mas pushed ahead with his grand designs, spending aggressively to sign players people have heard of, but the club skirted MLS salary cap rules and got slapped with roster sanctions. By the start of this season, their fourth, Inter Miami were the worst team in the league, with some of the worst attendance to match.
Jorge Mas, David Beckham and Jose Mas with the Leagues Cup in August 2023 (Kevin C Cox/Getty Images)
You wouldn’t know any of that now, watching the supporters section behind the goal become a sweaty, pulsating South Florida nightclub with Messi as their DJ-god. When he even thinks about touching the ball, they shriek. When he scores, they explode in a violent ecstasy of pink. These are the all-in fans, the ones who chose this club as their own before it existed, who showed up every week to bang drums and sing songs for a middling MLS team long before ex-Barcelona greats started dropping out of the sky, and they’re loving every second of this.
“It’s really weird to see us play, like, with competence,” says Gerard Williams, a member of The Siege supporters group. He’s a Jamaican-American who grew up following Manchester United and Real Madrid, so of course when word got out that Beckham would found a club in his backyard, he and his friends were there. Not everyone jumped on board so quickly. “Soccer is such a big part of the city, with the Latin American crowd,” he says, “but MLS is not.”
That changed in a matter of minutes on June 7, when Messi announced he had picked Inter Miami as his next club. Demand for tickets flew into a whole new stratosphere. The supporters section, usually a tight-knit community, became a tourist destination, though luckily most of the visitors come from Latin soccer cultures. “They come into our section and they know most of the songs,” Williams says, “because they’re songs that have been used by other teams, just with the lyrics changed.”
For anyone who isn’t a season ticket holder, witnessing Messi in the flesh will run you hundreds or thousands of dollars. For a lot of fans, it’s their first MLS game, a one-off experience. People flew in from South America for this. At his Inter Miami debut on July 21, a late substitute appearance where Messi won the game with a cinematic last-minute free kick, the guest list in Beckham’s section was the kind that doesn’t need last names: LeBron, Serena, Kim. You don’t see that a lot at a Friday night game for the Chicago Fire or Real Salt Lake.
As long as Messi is here, every game is an event. He’s 36, an age where most of us can land on the long-term injury list from a night of sleeping on our pillow funny. Who knows how much of him we have left? Even in a relatively rinky-dink league, in a makeshift stadium where the bleachers are thrown together with metal pipes, this type of athletic greatness — the kind that makes you reevaluate what corporeal beings are capable of, the kind that makes your whole chest cavity feel like it might fly out through your mouth — is worth the pilgrimage.
At least that’s what it says on the giddy faces spilling out of DRV PNK Stadium into the electric night. The line for shirts at the club shop is endless. People want to wear this experience. Inter Miami has won 4-0, a decisive result for South Florida’s two favourite things, beauty and money. “I spotted DJ Khaled!” a boy in an Argentina Messi shirt announces proudly to no one in particular. He bounces off into the darkness singing the Albiceleste’s World Cup anthem: Muchaaaaachos, ahora nos volvimos a ilusionar…
Inter Miami supporters at DRV PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale (Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images)
Messi is under contract for two and a half years, which translates to about 50 of these home games provided he can stay healthy. It’s a critical window. If Inter Miami can harness even a fraction of his star power in some kind of sustained fusion reaction, if they can find a way to keep these people coming back, it could power a brilliant new era of American soccer.
Next summer, the United States will host the Western Hemisphere’s best national teams for an intercontinental Copa America and in 2026, the country will host World Cup matches for the first time since 1994, the tournament that led to the launch of MLS. There has never been an opportunity like these next few years for soccer to make one last leap on a long upward trajectory and vault itself, finally and irrevocably, into the American sports mainstream.
That’s one version of how this could go. But there’s an alternative with a much longer, less triumphal history, one where soccer stars come and go in this country and so do the crowds that trail them. Messi isn’t the first Ballon d’Or winner to play on this particular patch of dirt in Broward County, Florida. He’s not even the first GOAT. Within a few years after the last time this happened, everything — the stars, the fans, even the entire league — had vanished.
Layers of failure
Back behind the spring break beaches, for a few skinny miles until the land sinks back into the Everglades, Fort Lauderdale is a plain white bread slice of America, its wide highways and flat, orderly rows of strip malls and apartment complexes rendered only slightly exotic by the bright green iguanas that skitter up tree trunks in the sweltering heat. Inter Miami’s stadium is tucked between Interstate 95 and the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. From the stands, in one direction, you can see low-slung auto shops and the insectoid silos of a concrete plant; in the other, the chemical turf and bright yellow uprights of an American football field.
There was already a stadium here when Beckham and Mas showed up to announce that this would be the site of Inter Miami’s temporary home. Bulldozing it was a little bit of a sore subject. Lockhart Stadium was built in the 1950s to host Broward County’s high school football games, but it had become an almost accidental soccer shrine, the ground where not one but two Ballon d’Or winners, George Best and Gerd Muller, once suited up as team-mates for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers against Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff.
Forty years later, the stadium was a suburban ruin with saplings sprouting improbably from the metal bleachers, its overgrown playing field long since reclaimed by Florida grasslands. Beckham, looking a little uncomfortable in a tailored suit and starched white collar, glanced at the tangled wilderness behind him. “It might need a little bit of a trim,” he deadpanned. Mas was more politic: “I view this as a great opportunity to look back at the great memories and the tribute that we give to legends who played on this field.”
Gerd Muller playing for Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the NASL in 1979 (Focus on Sport/Getty Images)
Jeff Rusnak, a longtime South Florida soccer columnist, graduated high school in 1977 on the day before Pele came to town. He had never seen him play — there was no way to watch — but he had read enough sports page coverage of the 1970 World Cup to know that this was a visit from sports royalty. “When he came, you knew it. And that just turned a light bulb on for everybody,” Rusnak said. “I think Messi is that, really, but Pele was the first.”
The Strikers and Pele’s New York Cosmos were part of the North American Soccer League, a forerunner to MLS that operated from 1968 to 1984. By the late ’70s, deep-pocketed owners were spending vast sums to lure global superstars past their sell-by date to America, where soccer was going to be the next big thing. The Strikers had been the Miami Toros until their owner Joe Robbie, who also owned the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, moved them up the road to Lockhart Stadium.
Ray Hudson didn’t know where Fort Lauderdale was. He was only supposed to come to Florida for a summer, a technical young midfielder recruited off the bench of Newcastle United to help fill out a squad in a league he had never heard of near a city that sounded magical: Miami. Suddenly he found himself lining up for the Strikers against some of the greatest to ever play the game.
“I remember I tried to nutmeg Beckenbauer,” Hudson said, “and he caught the ball with his foot after it had been passed through his legs. I thought I’d nutmegged him and he stopped it behind himself, knocked it off and gave me a wink.”
The big names worked as a marketing ploy. “DRV PNK Stadium is on the same hallowed ground as Lockhart Stadium, and the access to it used to be jammed — I mean, they were backed up on I-95 when the Cosmos came to town, and of course Pele,” Hudson remembered. For curious locals like Rusnak, the spectacle made converts out of them overnight. “The circus came to town, and we kept going back,” Rusnak said. “You cannot underestimate the effect on this town of having a really rapturous first kiss to keep the relationship going.”
For a few magical years, Fort Lauderdale was a soccer town. Along with Best and Muller, the Strikers signed other internationals including the legendary Peruvian attacking midfielder Teofilo Cubillas. “We had NFL owners, and they want to win, man. That’s all they wanted,” said Rusnak. “‘What do I got to do to beat the Cosmos?’. ‘Well, you better get this guy’. ‘OK!’.”
In the end, all the hype wasn’t enough to turn the NASL into a viable business, and the spending on stars became unsustainable. The vision of soccer as America’s sport of the future never came to pass. By the 1980s, the Strikers were playing indoors for dwindling crowds at an arena called the Hollywood Sportatorium, where the fragrance of ZZ Top and Emerson, Lake and Palmer concerts lingered in the stale air. When that didn’t work, the Robbies airlifted the whole club to Minnesota.
Hudson stayed with the team until the NASL folded, then eventually returned to Florida, playing for a later incarnation of the Strikers in an even less successful league. When MLS launched in the 1990s, he was hired to manage an expansion club called the Miami Fusion — though they, too, played in Lockhart Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, not the city they were named for. In 2001, the Fusion folded like the Strikers before them and, for the next couple of decades, the dream of professional soccer in South Florida was all but forgotten.
Ray Hudson as coach of Miami Fusion in 2001 (Eliot Schechter/ALLSPORT)
“There are just layers and layers of failed attempts to make soccer catch on in America,” said Rusnak, who covered the rise and fall of each new team for local newspapers. “It’s a land of dreamers, right? Everybody’s going to make it.”
What kept Hudson in the game through the fallow years was his eye for a great play and his unforgettable voice, which earned him work as a colour commentator, calling European games for American audiences from the sunny comforts of Florida.
Have you heard this voice? It’s magisterial. When he’s calm, it swoops and dives on the salty breeze of his Geordie accent, rising with each reedy vowel, skating over dropped consonants and coming to rest on the shore where each final ‘r’ washes away. There’s a lilt of disappointment in the music of his sentences, as though life itself were a sumptuous passing move that hasn’t quite come off. But he’s best known for the dizzy crescendo when something on the field excites him, which happens a lot, and the voice takes off like a tenor sax from breathy lower registers into high-pitched squawks of ecstasy — bweaaugghuagh! — at commercial airliner cruising altitudes.
One player in particular brought out the best in his commentary. A teenage attacker for Barcelona was doing things on TV that nobody had seen since Maradona and Pele, playing an alien species of soccer that tested the limits of human language. Hudson’s musical voice and flair for outrageous metaphor made him the unofficial poet laureate of Lionel Messi, whose career he has called for 17 years, putting words to hundreds of the most beautiful goals you’ll ever see.
You can go on YouTube right now and binge whole highlight reels with titles like “Lionel Messi – Ray Hudson – Insane Commentary (HD 720p)”. Maybe you’ll have favourite lines. Here are some of mine…
“If Lionel Messi was the captain of the Titanic, he would have nutmegged the iceberg.”
“He literally disperses the atoms inside of his body on one side of this defender and then collects them on the other.”
“He can follow you into a revolving door, Phil, and he’ll come out first.”
“When you find Messi in form like this, it’s like finding an alligator in your toilet bowl.”
“In the United States, we give hurricanes a name. If they ever call one Lionel Messi, you’d better evacuate, people.”
GO DEEPER
A privilege and a nightmare: What it’s like to play with and against Lionel Messi
The morning after Messi’s first start for Inter Miami, I met Hudson in a Fort Lauderdale diner. He still seemed a little stunned that the stray threads of his life had been tied back together in a neat little bow right here in Broward County, on the same spot where he’d once played against Pele, the same ground where he had coached in MLS. On the drive over, he had received a call from a local friend who knew nothing about his professional life except that something big was happening on her TV that he might be able to explain. South Florida was falling in love with soccer all over again.
“She said, ‘What do you think about the pink guy?’.” For a moment, telling the story, even Hudson was lost for words. “I almost drove off the road,” he said.
Hell freezes over
Messi’s move to America happened so fast that not even Adidas, which helped pay for his MLS contract, could prepare. Official pink No 10 shirts were sold out all over Florida for months. A pop-up store dedicated entirely to Messi opened with no warning in Miami Beach, but by the time I got there less than 24 hours later, it had been ransacked by ravenous fans, picked over for everything but a few XXL remnants. “Is this Messi mania?” asked a woman outside the store. “Yes, Messi mania, si,” a guy in line told her matter-of-factly.
The shirt shortage wasn’t a problem when the Messi tour went on the road. Hours before his first away game, at FC Dallas in early August, vendors were hawking hastily assembled fakes in a not-quite-right shade of pink under the scraggly live oaks along the edges of the stadium parking lot. If the letters weren’t fully glued on, the Texan sun would take care of it.
At the barbecue joint where I stopped for lunch, a kid in a Paris Saint-Germain Messi kit was piling his plate with brisket. Twenty-five years ago, when I was growing up here in the Dallas suburbs, that would have been remarkable. Everyone played soccer back then, or did our best uneducated impression of it, but European clubs were entirely foreign to us until streaming and FIFA (the game, not the governing body) brought them into this generation’s living room.
In the mid-1990s, a friend named Javier took me to my first MLS game, back when the local club was called the Dallas Burn. Their crest was a fire-breathing horse with lightning bolts for legs. It was a more beautiful time. The match was played in a cavernous old college football stadium, which was all wrong for soccer, but even though we could barely see the field we could feel the energy from the heavily Latin supporters section: the pulse of the drums, the strange music of the chants. It was way more exciting than watching baseball or the NFL.
In the newspapers I pored over every morning at breakfast, though, MLS didn’t exist. The sports pages were ruled by local columnists who held the unquestioned authority of tribal chieftains, and the limits of their language were the limits of our world. The Dallas Cowboys were king. The Rangers (baseball) and Mavericks (basketball) came next, followed by college and Texas high school football. Even hockey might get a passing glance from time to time. In this orderly universe, soccer was at best ignored and at worst revealed to be a communist plot to emasculate America’s youth.
The next time I was aware of the MLS team, it was because they had moved, disastrously, into the suburban high school football stadium next to ours. The ignominy of their second-class status there seemed to confirm soccer’s place in the unspoken hierarchy of sports. I figured the league must be about to close up shop.
The Dallas Burn in June 1997 (Stephen Dunn/Allsport)
As it turned out, my suspicions were right: in the early 2000s, around the time that the Miami Fusion folded, MLS was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. It survived, just barely, thanks to a handful of rich owners, among them Dallas’s Lamar Hunt, the son of a billionaire east Texas oilman. Hunt was a lifelong soccer booster who, at various times, owned two teams in the NASL and three in MLS, and it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that pro soccer in the United States might not exist without him. The 109-year-old U.S. Open Cup, America’s oldest soccer competition, was renamed in his honour while he was still alive.
Dan Hunt, Lamar’s son, is now president of the MLS club that has been renamed, boringly, FC Dallas (RIP fire-lightning-horse). The team moved to a soccer-specific stadium, which is good, but it’s way out in the far-flung suburb of Frisco, which is bad. They still don’t get much love from the Dallas sports media. On the day Messi visited, however, Hunt was bouncing from TV camera to TV camera, very much in demand, playing a starring role in the alternative future his soccer-loving dad had dreamed of for decades.
“I try to boil it down for people,” he told me, lapsing into American sports-speak: “If you’re not a soccer fan, this is like watching Michael Jordan. And more specifically, it’s like watching him during his second three-peat, because Messi’s coming off of winning the World Cup and still at the top of his game.”
GO DEEPER
Lionel Messi’s millions: The man, the brand and the money
Nobody in the Argentina-flag-waving masses queuing outside the stadium needed to be told. Just like everywhere else he played, fans had come from all over and forked over your average monthly new-car payment for what might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Messi play live. Up in the press box, though, the milieu was a little different. Tim Cowlishaw, one of my childhood heroes from the Dallas sports pages, was writing a vanishingly rare column on soccer — his first, as far as he could remember, in seven or eight years.
“Oh my god,” drawled Gina Miller, the club’s head of comms, as she rushed over to greet Cowlishaw. “Hell has frozen over! On a hot 107-degree day!”
It really was terrifyingly hot. Every game that Messi had played for Inter Miami, in Florida and now Texas, had taken place at temperatures that made the Qatar World Cup seem downright brisk by comparison. I started to wonder how long his hamstrings could keep this up before they turned into smoked brisket.
That day Messi’s legs worked just fine. He scored the first goal five minutes in, a laser from the top of the box off a classic Jordi Alba cutback that would have sent Ray Hudson into paroxysms. He set up two more with a through ball and a curled set piece, then scored a scorcher of a direct free kick in the 85th minute to send the game to penalties. He calmly tucked his penalty inside the right post, and soon Inter Miami were through to the next round. In his column, Cowlishaw translated the situation for Texans: “In four games with Inter Miami, Messi has seven goals and two assists. If those aren’t GOAT numbers in this sport, then they don’t exist.”
Driving south out of Dallas the next morning, I turned on sports talk radio to see if soccer had somehow broken through, but they were vigorously debating the merits of college football conference realignment. It felt reassuringly familiar. Then the program paused for the latest breaking news, and the leading item wasn’t about the Rangers or Cowboys but on how the long-forgotten FC Dallas had nearly toppled Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami last night. The rumours were true: hell really had frozen over.
FC Dallas fans during their game with Inter Miami in August (Logan Riely/Getty Images)
Compounding interest
It took only seven games of Messi’s Inter Miami career for the worst team in MLS to lift their first trophy. To be fair, the Leagues Cup was a brand new tournament that barely felt like a real competition when it started — more like a glorified series of friendlies shoehorned into the middle of the MLS season to gin up some manufactured rivalry with Liga MX.
In Messi’s overcrowded personal trophy case, it might not even earn a spot on the bottom shelf. But the breathless knockout drama of that first month, when it felt like Inter Miami might never lose again, was as fun a sports story as MLS had ever produced. Serious competition or not, America’s first taste of Messi mania was unforgettable.
For MLS, Messi’s arrival couldn’t possibly have gone better. The rivalry with Liga MX has been a driving force behind American soccer’s decade of rapid growth. It spurred owners to spend more on their squads, not just on NASL-style marquee names but on mid-price players who can help MLS teams be genuinely competitive. The league has invested heavily in academies, producing promising young players such as Inter Miami’s homegrown Argentina-born U.S. international Benjamin Cremaschi, and created new spending initiatives to entice foreign prospects such as Messi’s new Argentine team-mates Tomas Aviles and Diego Gomez.
Now, with vastly more eyeballs on American soccer than ever, Messi and his Barcelona pals led these kids to victory in a tournament that included heavyweight Mexican clubs.
More importantly, this was all playing out on Apple TV+, thanks to a major new quarter-billion-dollar broadcast agreement that replaced MLS’ hodgepodge of local TV deals with a single subscription service available anywhere in the world through the biggest tech company on Earth. Apple helped finance Messi’s Inter Miami contract by offering him a cut of new foreign subs, and now they were being richly repaid by Messi doing Messi things on the pitch. Every time a new Inter Miami goal hit the internet, it did numbers that MLS could never have imagined in its wildest dreams.
GO DEEPER
Apple, Lionel Messi and the $2.5bn question: What’s next?
League executives are understandably over the moon about all this. “Apple are very private about their numbers, but I can tell you that the interest in subscriptions internationally has spiked,” deputy commissioner Gary Stevenson told me in August. “Adidas is a partner with Messi, and they’ve had more jersey sales in this period than they’ve ever had with any athlete. You can go through social media — I mean, any metric you look at is off the charts.”
It’s less clear, though, how MLS plans to turn its annus mirabilis into sustainable long-term growth. Stevenson talked about the growing number of soccer-specific stadiums around the league and how good they look and sound on the crisp new Apple broadcasts, which is undeniably true. The idea is that the Messi-curious masses, whether they’re American “super sports fans” who watch whatever’s on SportsCenter or foreign soccer fans tuning into MLS from overseas, will see attractive, exciting games and want to keep coming back for more.
“Our goal by 2026 is to double our fanbase. If we double our fanbase, you can imagine what that means,” Stevenson said. “And once we double our fanbase in 2026, then we double it and we double it again. It’s like compounding interest.”
The question is how they’ll get all those new fans in the door. There were no set plans to move Messi’s games to bigger venues for one-off extravaganzas, since that would undercut the goal of showing off MLS’ new soccer stadiums, but that decision limits in-person attendance to season ticketholders or people who can afford relatively scarce single-game tickets through the league’s supply-and-demand dynamic pricing model or the even more expensive resale market.
The Apple TV logo now adorns the sleeve of all MLS jerseys (Soobum Im/Getty Images)
And Apple’s $14.99-a-month (£12.30) standard price for MLS Season Pass may be a great deal for diehards but it seems like a harder sell to American “super sports fans” just starting to get into soccer, not to mention fans from developing economies who are charged the same in Buenos Aires as in Boca Raton.
“Our research indicates that fans around the world have an average of 2.9 clubs that they like,” Stevenson said. “So if you’re a fan of Inter Miami, you can also be a fan of, say, Arsenal and a fan of a team in La Liga.” That’s common enough for Inter Miami fans such as Gerard Williams, who will happily follow Manchester United along with their hometown club, but it’s a steeper climb to make it work the other way around, getting Arsenal or Barcelona fans to adopt an MLS team as their own.
But if anyone can make this work, it’s Messi, one of the most beloved people on the planet. Business types around the league get googly-eyed just talking about his 490 million Instagram followers — way more than the official Premier League, NFL, NBA and MLB accounts combined. But he is also, it bears repeating, an incredibly boring person. Nobody really cares that much about what Messi says or does off the pitch. People care about him because they care very, very deeply about watching him play soccer.
The soccer part of the Messi story hit a wall in September, not long after the Leagues Cup triumph, when he went to play for Argentina during an international break and came back with a nagging injury that kept him sidelined for most of what was left of the MLS season. What was supposed to be a dramatic race to get Inter Miami into the playoffs became a slow, sad anticlimax as the team struggled without him and finished the season just one spot from the bottom of the table. The MLS playoffs will go on without Messi — a blessing, maybe, for fans of other teams who were getting exhausted of the monomaniacal coverage of all things pink, but a crushing blow for business metrics.
Still the Messi industrial complex cranks on, undaunted. Next week, Inter Miami will embark on an off-season friendly tour in China, which is the sort of thing you usually see from Real Madrid or Manchester United, not the 14th-best team in the MLS Eastern Conference. Apple recently released a documentary series called Messi Meets America, which critics are raving has “all the heft of a late-night infomercial”. On some level, the soccer is beside the point.
But everyone involved recognises that Messi’s time in the United States is a precious resource, and that the stakes are nothing less than a once-in-a-lifetime chance to transform the world’s biggest sport in the world’s biggest sports market.
In an unusually frank interview with GQ last month, a veteran Apple executive named Eddy Cue laid out the challenge: “We’ve been given an incredible gift in that this can accelerate, but we still have to go execute. You still have to go execute and leverage this — and then make sure you get the most out of this, because he isn’t 25. He’s not going to be here 10 years from now. If we do nothing else and he’s gone in three years — pick whatever time period — you could easily go right back.”
GO DEEPER
Inside the Lionel Messi to Inter Miami deal — seeing off Saudis, equity offers and Beckham and Co.’s secret trip
The most interesting story of the off-season will be what, if any, changes MLS makes to try to make its soccer better while the world is watching. Mas has been openly lobbying to loosen the roster rules so that ambitious owners, such as Inter Miami’s ownership group, can spend more on players without getting slapped with sanctions. Stevenson would only say that discussions are always ongoing, and that “we have a very active ownership group that looks for ways for us to continue to invest in our product”. In other words: no promises.
Once it’s over, it’s over
Florida is only really pink when there’s a storm brewing. Inter Miami’s signature colour is part of the pastel palette of South Beach, sure, but so are purple and seafoam green and the melancholy coral of a broken neon light on the Hotel Victor, which flashes an incoherent signal out to sea. To get the good stuff, you have to turn away from the city and scope out what Wallace Stevens called “Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea”. Out there, the sunrise paints just the right shade — Pantone 1895C — on massive thunderheads lit from within by thin blue wires of lightning.
The pale green ocean is boiling hot and eerily void of life. The beach is empty, too, except for evenly spaced lifeguard towers that resemble sea snails the colours of Starbursts. When you turn back toward the horizon, an enormous cargo ship has materialised out of nowhere. It’s all out of proportion to its surroundings. The Lego-block stacks of containers appear taller than the condo towers at the southern tip of the beach. The ship chugs off toward the storm, moving faster than you expect, and slips silently out of sight. It’s hard to be sure it was ever there.
For my last few days in Florida, I resolve to go looking for signs of Messi.
It’s not that I expect to actually bump into him. He’s probably at the training ground nutmegging icebergs or whatever. What I want to find is any kind of evidence that the city is accepting him as its own, that he’s more to Miami than just the pink guy on TV or a multiplier cell in a spreadsheet. I guess I’m still hoping Messi might mean something to America.
At first, the search takes the most boringly literal approach: counting soccer shirts. Maybe it’s just because all the stores are sold out, but there are hardly any shirts to count. The morning after his debut, two boys in Miami’s black-and-pink La Noche kits are kicking a ball on the beach and shouting in what sounds like Russian. Then, for days, nothing.
I head for the nearest Adidas store, figuring I might have more luck there. All I see are two men standing outside the store, snapping pictures of its pink facade. I ask where they’re from. They tell me to guess. They’re wearing bucket hats with socks and sandals. Too easy. Germany. “That’s right,” they admit. Inside the store, an employee with round sunglasses and Hall and Oates hair tells me that before Messi came, they didn’t even bother carrying Inter Miami gear, but yesterday they sold their entire stock of his shirts in less than two hours. A tinted vehicle had pulled up to the event and everyone got excited but it was just the president of Adidas.
At a surf shop, I meet a yellowing taxidermied alligator reared up on its hind legs, wearing a sign around its neck: YOU CAN TAKE MY PICTURE, BUT YOU CANNOT TOUCH ME. This feels like a perfect manifestation of Messi. Now we’re getting somewhere.
One thing you’ll hear a lot is that Miami isn’t really a sports town, that they only like winners. It’s true that they have some of the worst attendance figures in almost every league. Sometimes the explanations strike me as overly reductive, such as “Cubans only like baseball”, but the most plausible one I hear is the simplest: why go to games when you can go to the beach for free?
I decide to go to a baseball game anyway, hoping to encounter the American super sports fan in his natural habitat. The guy next to me is wearing a camo Marlins hat. He’s actually pretty chill. He knows about Kylian Mbappe. He knows about “that guy that went to LA — Zlatan?” And, of course, he knows about Messi — he’s seen the Inter Miami goals on ESPN — but it’s not worth the price of a ticket or the drive up to Fort Lauderdale to go see him. I ask him if Messi might change the sports scene in Miami, but he purses his lips and shakes his head solemnly. “Once it’s over, it’s over,” he says.
Pretty much all the soccer fans I meet that week are Argentine. There’s an Uber driver whose son plays in a local club academy. A couple on the beach share their yerba mate with me — their friends paid $250 to see Messi play but they were too busy working. At a parrilla, the walls are completely covered in Argentina memorabilia, including a shirt signed by Messi himself. I ask if he’s come in to eat but the waitress says he hasn’t yet. “We’re hoping!” she says, crossing her fingers.
A tattoo artist says no one has requested an Inter Miami piece but he shows me the perfect bottle of ink he’s got saved for when they do. It seems way too pink but maybe that’s just how tattoos work, who knows?
None of this feels like it’s getting me much closer to understanding what Messi means, so on my last day, I take off walking across the city. I find him almost immediately, looming over I-95 on an Apple-branded billboard, all out of proportion to his surroundings. Pretty soon I’m in Little Havana. There are brilliantly coloured roosters strutting across the street like they own it, which strikes me as even more exotic than Fort Lauderdale’s iguanas. At an open-air market, a vendor is selling novelty votive candles, so I take a quick inventory: Spider-Man, the Miami Heat, Yoda, Barbie (wrong pink). Down in the corner of the display, I find it — one pale pink candle for Saint Leo.
A rooster, contemplating crossing the road (John Muller/ The Athletic )
Miami’s main business, as far as I can tell, appears to be building more Miami. It’s an impossibly young city, roughly the same age as FC Barcelona. There’s construction everywhere you look. That’s how Mas’ family made its billions, building Miami. It’s why they were able to build DRV PNK Stadium in a matter of months. Pretty soon — maybe even before Messi retires — they plan to build Inter Miami’s permanent stadium, Miami Freedom Park, on the site of an old golf course out by the airport.
But the city is also sinking as fast as they can build it. Here and there along the walk, I see water seeping from under the sidewalks and pooling darkly in the street, forced up through layers of porous limestone by the rising, boiling green ocean. Layers of failure. According to some climate change projection maps, one of the areas most vulnerable to flooding — after Miami Beach is underwater, anyway — isn’t the coastline. It’s that little patch out by the airport where the new billion-dollar stadium development will be.
Late in the afternoon, I’m standing at the old golf course, peering through a chain-link fence as planes come and go overhead. I try to envision the best possible version of the future, the one where Messi takes the field here for Inter Miami in a brand new jewel of a soccer stadium in 2026, on the eve of America’s World Cup. I try to imagine other futures, too: one where he retires early; one where the stadium falls through and the team stays in Fort Lauderdale; one where MLS folds; one where everything is underwater. Mostly I just think about that goal he scored the other night, the one where he banked it off the post to himself.
There are kids playing baseball in the park behind me, shouting in Spanish. The sky is dark and fat with rain. I remember one of the last things Rusnak told me, trying to sum up what Messi meant to him.
“I think that, you know, just as a soccer person, being able to experience this as our team… it won’t last forever,” he said. “And when it’s gone, we’ll say, ‘But at least we had it’.”
(Header photo via Getty Images; design by Sam Richardson)
