Andrew Potter: Leo Messi and the Miami Globetrotters are ruining soccer

Whether he plays or not, the greatest player of all time might be the worst thing to happen to the MLS

By: Andrew Potter

The MLS has a serious problem, and its name is Lionel Messi. 

For those not following (the rest of you can skip this paragraph): The MLS is Major League Soccer, the premier men’s professional soccer league in North America. There are 29 teams in the league, including Canadian franchises in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. It was founded in 1993 but has been undergoing significant expansion over the past half decade or so, including adding a team based in Miami in 2018. Lionel Messi, meanwhile, is an Argentine forward who spent most of his career with Barcelona of Spain’s top tier La Liga. A year and a half ago, Messi led Argentina to victory in the World Cup, cementing his status as the best player of his generation, and arguably of all time.  

Last summer, the 36-year old Messi joined Inter Miami, in a signing that rocked the soccer world. He brought with him in his wake a handful of his old Barcelona teammates, including defender Jordi Alba, midfielder Sergio Busquets, and most recently, striker Luis Suarez. Until their arrival, Inter Miami was consistently one of the worst teams in the league. This year though, the four have led the club to the top of the MLS standings, with Messi and Suarez currently tied for third in the league in scoring. 

Off the pitch, the impact has been even more extraordinary. Messi’s arrival instantly gave the league the international profile and credibility that it has sought for years, and that has translated into an enormous pile of cash. In 2022, Apple signed an exclusive deal for the rights to streaming MLS games on its Apple TV service. Subscriptions to the MLS Season Pass — which costs $99 a year in Canada on top of a monthly Apple TV+ subscription — lagged well behind expectations, until Messi joined the league. Since then, ecstatic Apple execs have boasted only that Messi had a “material” effect on revenues, which some reports suggest amounted to an immediate doubling of subscriptions. 

Messi has had a similar effect on ticket sales across the league. Many clubs, especially those in the Eastern Conference, where teams are guaranteed a home game against Inter Miami, saw a huge spike in season ticket sales over the winter; CF Montreal, for example, more than doubled its season ticket sales to 15,000, and it probably could have sold out the entire 20,000 seat Stade Saputo if it had not held back the remaining seats for smaller packages and single-game tickets. In a late-season game against Miami last year, the Chicago Fire sold out its entire 62,000 seat stadium (against a normal crowd of around 10,000) and generated 55 per cent of its entire season’s ticket revenue in that one match. 

This is the story across the board. The Messi effect touches every possible aspect of the game, from merchandise sales to sponsorships to social media reach. The MLS might as well be called the Messi League of Soccer, and it is a big problem. 

To begin with, the obvious on-field impact of Messi and friends will almost certainly generate a spending arms race in the MLS. The league has tried pretty hard over the years to maintain a certain level of financial parity amongst franchises and to encourage the development of domestic talent, imposing a theoretical salary cap. But the league has added a number of loopholes to the cap over the years, to the point where with a small bit of creative accounting a team can spend more or less whatever it wishes. The evolution of the MLS into a two-tier league of haves and have-nots is inevitable.

Fair enough, you might say; that’s the way soccer works overseas. Except in the case of Messi, not just the team but the league itself is going out of its way to make him happy. His deal with Inter Miami reportedly includes equity in the club, as well as a share of the profits from the league’s exclusive deals with both Adidas and Apple. As a way of showing its appreciation, earlier this year Apple debuted its documentary Messi’s World Cup: The Rise of a Legend; slightly less hagiographically, the weekly Apple TV hour-long wrapup of each week’s slate of MLS matches typically begins with an extended in-depth analysis of whatever game Miami happened to have played, while the official MLS app almost always foregrounds highlights and wrap ups of Miami games. All of this has made Messi not just the face of the franchise but the face of the league, with Inter Miami the favoured child. 

Another problem of course, is what happens when Messi doesn’t play. The Saturday before last, Inter Miami had an away game scheduled in Vancouver against the hometown Whitecaps, and the club had sold 55,000 tickets in BC Place stadium in anticipation. Just a few days before the game, Miami announced that not only would Messi be skipping the match, but Alba, Bousquets and Suarez would stay home as well. The panicked Whitecaps had to do some quick damage control in the face of a petition from outraged ticket holders demanding a refund; they ended up promising a bunch of activities in the stadium to make it a fun night regardless, and offering fans half off food and drink during the game. Small consolation for those who only had one reason for going in the first place, and that wasn’t to cheer on the Whitecaps.

Even the league itself conceded that teams (i.e. Miami) needed to do a better job of communicating player availability, but that hasn’t mollified the still-miffed fans. This week, a B.C. man filed to certify a class-action lawsuit against the Vancouver Whitecaps over what he describes as a bait-and-switch operation, where the club charged a significant premium for tickets to the Miami game and did not deliver on the promised superstars. The suit is demanding refunds for the 50,000-plus fans who didn’t get what they paid for. The suit won’t go anywhere, but the man has a point.

Look, Messi is 36, Suarez is 37, Alba and Bousquets are 35. In the era of load management, players are going to sit out games. It is easy enough to say, you buy a ticket, you take your chances, but the league, and its clubs, can’t consistently make it clear that Messi is the show, charge a massive premium for tickets, and then, when he doesn’t play, just shrug and say “them’s the breaks.”

But the truth is, things aren’t always that great when the Barça road show actually does show up for road games. When Inter Miami played in Montreal on May 11, all except the injured Alba made the trip, with Messi playing the entire 90 minutes. The stadium was a sea of pink and black Messi jerseys, much to the anger of the CF Montreal supporters groups who put out a note on social media saying if you were in one of the designated supporters sections and wearing away team colours, you’d be asked to leave. 

Whatever. Messi got a roar the moment he stepped onto the field, and again every time he so much as glanced at the ball after that. When he went down before half time after a hard tackle, the stadium went silent with worry. In the dying minutes of the game, with Miami up 3-2 but Messi still off the scoresheet, the overwhelmingly pro-Messi crowd was chanting his name, hoping to see a decisive goal from the player many consider the GOAT. 

This didn’t seem to bother some of the the CF Montreal players, who couldn’t wait to shake Messi’s hand after the game. A few of them even posted social media shots of their game jerseys signed by Messi. It fell to Laurent Courtois, the CF Montreal coach, to bell the cat here. He loudly bitched at the press conference after the game, noting that there’s not much point in playing at home if the crowd is openly cheering for the other team to score.  

But this is the way things are going to be as long as Messi is around. Inter Miami isn’t just another soccer club, they are essentially the Harlem Globetrotters of the MLS, with Messi as Meadowlark Lemon leading Curly, Geese and Gip. Like the Globetrotters, they are packed full of stars far too talented for their opposition. Like the Globetrotters, every game is a home game. And like the Globetrotters, the opposition is there not to put up a fight, but to serve as an anonymous vehicle through which Miami’s, and especially Messi’s, talent and celebrity is made manifest. 

The customers in this case are not local diehards, in some cases not even fans of the MLS or even soccer. They are global pop cultural tourists, paying big money for a chance to tell their kids, or at least, Instagram, that they once saw Leo Messi score a goal. 

Andrew Potter is a season ticket holder of CF Montreal. Follow him at his newsletter Nevermind: The Forgotten History of Generation X.

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