By Felipe Cardenas / The Athletic
Fireworks shot out from the rafters of Inter Miami’s Chase Stadium in Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday night, but there was nothing for the home team to celebrate.
When the final whistle blew, Inter Miami had been beaten 3-2 by ninth-seeded Atlanta United and eliminated from the MLS playoffs. Atlanta had taken the decisive Game 3 of the series and advanced to the Eastern Conference semifinals.
The pyrotechnics were an awkward way to end an otherwise successful season for Lionel Messi’s club. Wait. How can Inter Miami’s 2024 campaign be considered a success?
To go out at this stage of the playoffs is an embarrassment for a team whose notoriety has skyrocketed since Messi’s arrival in July 2023. In a temporary home stadium that has become a fortress for Miami this year, Messi and his teammates were eliminated by an opponent that was mediocre for most of the season.
After setting the MLS regular-season points record (74) and claiming the Supporters’ Shield, awarded to the club with the best regular-season record, Miami was, in the minds of many, obligated to win the MLS Cup final at the end of these playoffs on Dec. 7. So what went wrong? And what does this exit mean for the 37-year-old Messi and Miami’s manager, Gerardo Martino?
The 61-year-old Argentine Martino was forced to tinker with his lineup at the most inopportune moment of the season. The ever-reliable Sergio Busquets, suffering from a chest injury, was benched, and Yannick Bright, a ball-winning midfielder with polished possession skills, was unavailable because of a muscle injury sustained in Game 2 in Atlanta.
Messi stepped up Saturday, orchestrating the first goal of the game (scored by Matias Rojas) and then, after Atlanta took a 2-1 lead, scoring the equalizer himself. But the visitors’ winner came when midfielder Bartosz Slisz’s powerful header stunned the Chase Stadium crowd with 14 minutes to go.
Miami had scored 79 goals during the regular season and routinely dominated possession, but its weaknesses were also there for everyone to see. Atlanta exposed Miami’s high line throughout the series and finished its chances clinically. Despite its regular-season success, Martino’s side had always been susceptible to the counterattack, and that vulnerability after losing possession cost them.
Miami’s ownership group of David Beckham and brothers Jorge and José Mas have spent more than $70 million on first-team signings, pushing the MLS salary cap rule to its limits. Messi, Busquets, Luis Suárez and Jordi Alba brought their spectacular resumes to MLS with one thing in mind: winning titles. A Leagues Cup trophy in 2023 set the stage for a storybook run this season.
With Martino at the helm, a manager accustomed to the brightest lights in world football after leading Barcelona and the Argentina and Mexico men’s national teams, Miami had all the tools, including home-field advantage, to win its first MLS Cup. To be out this early is a worst-case scenario for MLS and Apple, the league’s broadcast partner.
“It’s not a success when you lose in the quarterfinal round,” Martino said. “If one thinks about where we were last November, there has been progress for the club, not just the team. If one considers the expectations we had for these playoffs, we’ve come up very short.”
It’s simple to claim that the Inter Miami project has failed to deliver. But Miami is unlike any club MLS has seen since its inaugural season 28 years ago. The team’s success won’t be measured based solely on what it does on the field. In five years, Miami has gone from a startup with a handful of eager employees to a global brand with extraordinary reach. Messi will forever be linked to this club, a reality that will outweigh any trophy he may win in the United States.
An MLS Cup will never define Messi’s legacy — nothing he does while in Miami’s pink and black uniform will dent or strengthen the career of the sport’s greatest player. As Beckham said in 2023, Inter Miami succeeded when it signed Messi.
Beckham and Messi are linked in more ways than one. Beckham, the former England captain, didn’t win an MLS Cup until his fifth year in the league, following two loan spells with A.C. Milan. Beckham’s L.A. Galaxy followed up its 2011 triumph with another MLS Cup the following year, but Beckham may be remembered most for the designated player rule that allows teams to sign stars outside of their salary caps.
Messi, an eight-time Ballon d’Or winner and World Cup hero for Argentina’s triumphant side in 2022, is also playing in MLS for reasons that go far beyond the touchline. Miami signed him to change the trajectory of American soccer, to become an icon in a country that still turns its back on the global game.
The marketing machine that Messi commands has made inroads in a nation cluttered with celebrity and mainstream sports. In February, Xavier Asensi, Inter Miami’s chief business officer, said the club had achieved revenue that was more than the preseason figures of Europe’s biggest clubs, with estimates near $20 million for a U.S. preseason tour.
Internationally, the Inter Miami project has been a smashing success, but in America, the Messi phenomenon has been normalized. It was almost unbelievable to suggest that he would ever come to MLS. Now, after just 1 1/2 seasons, MLS fans complain of Messi fatigue.
On Friday, with Miami facing elimination, there was one lone television camera at its pregame media availability.
Other than the Diario Olé newspaper from Argentina, the global press, which had landed in Fort Lauderdale in hordes a year ago, was nowhere to be found. Inter Miami is covered by a dedicated group of local reporters, but on some days there are no more than two or three journalists at the training facility. It doesn’t help that Messi has given just one news conference (in August 2023) since arriving.
He has been a model teammate and a joy to watch, but his unwillingness to talk to the press has lessened his effect stateside. When Messi speaks, the world listens. When he doesn’t engage with the press in a country whose media landscape is dominated by sports talk shows that discuss anything but soccer, the silence, as they say, can be deafening.
In late October, in an interview with journalist Fabrizio Romano, Messi said his desired superpower would be invisibility. One can empathize with somebody whose life has been anything but private for more than 20 years. In Fort Lauderdale, thousands of miles away from the football paparazzi that followed him for years in Barcelona and Paris, after his move to Paris St.-Germain, Messi has as normal a life as he has ever had. But MLS cannot afford for him to go unnoticed in America.
This playoff loss against Atlanta proved that big moments can be fleeting. It’s no secret that Messi, who will turn 38 in June, is nearing the end of his illustrious career. He hasn’t ruled out playing at the 2026 World Cup, which will be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Messi’s contract with Inter Miami runs through the 2025 MLS season, a year before that World Cup and a year before the club’s new Miami-based stadium opens.
With that in mind, Miami’s early elimination puts additional pressure on the club’s owners to maximize Messi’s talent and his massive brand appeal. The clock, seemingly, is running out.
The MLS playoffs will continue without Messi, and for a league that needs as much attention as it can get, Saturday’s outcome in Fort Lauderdale was deflating.
But this is soccer in America. There’s a long way to go toward relevance.
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