You may love Lionel Messi, his dear old friends Luis Suarez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba from the FC Barcelona salad days, and the pink-and-black kits they now don in the service of Inter Miami. Or you may loathe them. Your touch point to Major League Soccer may be as a Messi stan, a casual soccer fan intrigued by his presence or a loyal supporter of another club irked by the ravenous attention devoted to his team instead of yours.
Whatever your reaction to MLS’s tentpole attraction, you have little choice but to reckon with it on at least some level as its 2024 campaign gets underway Wednesday night in Fort Lauderdale, where – of course – Miami and their Gulf Stream Galaticos are the feature act in a rare standalone season opener, welcoming Real Salt Lake to just-rechristened Chase Stadium three days before the other 27 franchises kick off at the weekend.
While opinions vary as to whether it will in fact conquer all before it, the star-studded project conceived and bankrolled by Jorge Mas, his brother José, David Beckham and the rest of IMCF’s ownership group is the defining storyline at the starting line of the annual MLS marathon. Whether it thrives or not, it casts a long shadow, so much so that it has already shifted the league’s gravity in profound ways even before the opening whistle blows on his first full year on board.
“I think that this will put MLS on a different trajectory that started when Beckham came to MLS and had us part of the global conversation,” commissioner Don Garber said of Messi’s presence in an interview with the Associated Press last week. “And who knows what that’s going to look like years from now? But certainly we’re in a different position today than we had been, with Messi in our league.”
After many years of laboring, often unsuccessfully, to foster dominant, relevant teams in the big-market metropolises of New York and Los Angeles, following what’s long been considered powerful pro-sports conventional wisdom, MLS now finds itself a unipolar league in its 29th season.
Or perhaps ‘heliocentric’ is a more apt descriptor: Illuminated by the transcendent star power of the game’s greatest living player, awestruck by his excellence and towering commercial potency even with the chapters written by the likes of Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimovic still lingering in the collective memory.
Just how towering? The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio, who is currently writing a book called ‘The Messi Effect’ about this saga, reported that Miami’s visit to Chicago Fire FC last October was the most lucrative single match in MLS history, with a Fire club-record crowd of 62,124 at Soldier Field reaping somewhere between $7 and $10 million in revenue — more than every other ‘23 Chicago home game combined. And that was a game to which Messi didn’t even travel, due to injury.
Some of IMCF’s league counterparts are selling out season-ticket packages in large part via fans’ eagerness to gain access to Messi’s one annual away trip to their city. The Argentine icon’s appeal has dwarfed even Beckham’s monumental impact, making even previously obscure teammates into cult figures and turning his club’s modest press pack into a teeming horde.
“Really, it’s all that comes with participating in the same group where Leo is. It’s what he generates,” said his coach, Gerardo “Tata” Martino, in Spanish last week. “It happened to us in the league last year, it happened to us now on the tour, it’s going to continue happening to us all this time and well, we in some way also enjoy everything that he generates here.”
Naturally, most fans of the other 28 teams will find this infuriating. So much of the hype being generated hinges on names and resumes and jersey sales and hypotheticals rather than results on an actual MLS field, threatening to drown out compelling stories elsewhere.
Like the Columbus Crew’s remarkable run to a second MLS Cup win in four years — in the aftermath of an ugly attempted relocation, no less — under the delightfully progressive tactics and inspirational guidance of Wilfried Nancy, the first championship-winning Black head coach in league history.
Or the chaotic vibrance of newcomer St. Louis City SC and its legions of noisy fans, who by their sheer force of spirit made league leaders look silly for taking three decades to set up shop in the sport’s U.S. cradle. Or the dogged consistency of flagship clubs LAFC and the Seattle Sounders, whose sturdy organizational cultures and commitment to success have made them constant contenders, defying the parity-centric ground rules of a league congenitally suspicious of dynasties.
It’s not particularly fair that Miami’s sheer ambition and wealth have elevated it into that tier based on four 30-something icons, a seven-match run to the Leagues Cup trophy and the promise of bigger things to come. Inter finished third from bottom in the overall standings last season, as even an upturn in league play following Messi’s midsummer arrival couldn’t rescue their playoff hopes thanks to months of woeful play in the months prior.
Even accounting for the usual caveats about the limited usefulness of preseason match results, the Herons didn’t exactly portend greatness on their exhausting round-the-world exhibition tour, either racking up nearly as many international incidents as they did goals scored and picking up a range of injuries both small and severe. With so much invested in the glamour roles, MLS roster rules inevitably impose limitations on other areas of the squad and Miami’s recurring defensive vulnerabilities have stubbornly persisted.
All of which dials up the pressure on Messi & Co. that much further, which in turn makes them that much more compelling an entertainment product, and promises to gobble up that much more of MLS’s oxygen.
In most any circumstances, MLS watchers would have ample other topics to bat around right now.
There’s the record number of member clubs participating in continental competition thanks to the expanded, rebranded Concacaf Champions Cup. The significant rules changes, like in-stadium announcements of VAR decisions, and timed substitutions and off-field injury treatment to reduce down time in match play, all of which underline the league’s eagerness to be a laboratory for progressive reforms. The new anti-discrimination policy crafted in concert with Black Players for Change, with an emphasis on restorative justice that could prove influential.
More salaciously, MLS has also begun to resemble a ruthless hegemon rather than the sickly child of decades past. Flush with the commercial boost from Messi Mania, it’s ratcheting up ticket and jersey prices. Its refereeing arm, PRO, just locked out its referees and rounded up replacements after a breakdown in collective bargaining negotiations with the PSRA union, which has alleged unfair labor practices. It’s throwing its weight around with a cynical behind-the-scenes effort to limit its involvement (and thus cripplingly marginalize) in the history-rich institution that is the U.S. Open Cup.
It is probably no coincidence that all this has bubbled into the public eye right as Messi prepares to take the field again. His participation can only deepen MLS owners’ certainty that the path they’ve charted is the correct one. And whether you think of all this as welcome signs of maturity or soulless profiteering kicking into overdrive, MLS notes that above all, you are thinking about MLS, which was much less likely to be the case just a few years ago.
“I’m not concerned about it at all,” Garber told ESPN when asked about the risk of Messi’s presence overshadowing the rest of the league. “We’re trying to always open up our team and our league to those people that are fans of the sport that might not yet be fully committed to our clubs, and getting people here and around the world to follow MLS and experience it is a positive. Our job is to convert those fans into being passionate supporters of our league and our clubs. And if we have a brand that has global recognition like Inter Miami does, that’s a positive.
“There are probably more followers of the New York Yankees around the world than there are of other Major League Baseball clubs. I think that’s good for Major League Baseball.”