Uhh, Messi’s in my WhatsApp group. Behind the scenes of the Miami hero’s first days

The question was dropped innocently into the Inter Miami team WhatsApp group chat ahead of last Sunday’s event officially unveiling Lionel Messi as its historic new signing.

“Hey,” Inter Miami forward Leonardo Campana wrote. “Does anybody have any extra tickets?”

We can all picture what would follow such a query. Maybe an offer to sell “for the right price.” Perhaps an amusing sticker in jest. What came instead was a shock.

Messi himself popped in to ask how many tickets Campana needed.

“I didn’t even know that Messi was in the group chat yet,” Inter Miami right back DeAndre Yedlin said. “Just from there, I was like, ‘Whoa’. They’ve known each other two days, three days. Just to show that generosity, that’s a great first example of how he is.”

Messi’s teammates all rushed to save his phone number, coming up with pseudonyms for their famous teammate — the better to keep it safe should they ever be hacked or lose their phone.

But imagine, if you will, what it’s like for a last-place MLS team half-filled with players making less than $100,000 per year to suddenly have Messi in their group chat.

This is just a glimpse into the new reality of life as an Inter Miami player; the surreal first 10 days between Messi arriving in the U.S. and the match-winning free kick that was beamed around the world. It’s fair to say things have changed a bit.

On July 11, Messi stepped off of a private jet at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. On July 21, he stood 24 yards from goal with the chance to win his debut on essentially the last kick of the game with a shot that had an eight percent chance of going in. The 10 days in between had been a buzz of activity at every level of MLS. From league lawyers racing to finalize Messi’s contract by the weekend, to the stadium workers squeegeeing off the stage at a rain-soaked unveil event last Sunday, to the academy kids glued to watching Messi train and even his teammates figuring out the right way to approach him. The chaos seemingly never stopped. Asked what their working hours had been since Messi’s arrival, one team employee sighed, shook their head and offered nothing but a smile as a response.

“It’s been 24/7,” Inter Miami owner Jorge Mas said last week.

The moment before he swung his magical left foot felt like the first time things came to a standstill around Messi since he landed in Florida. It is what makes players like Messi who they are. That ability to deliver when everything and everyone around them stops to see if they can.

“As soon as I saw the free kick I thought, this is the way it’s meant to end,” Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham said on the Apple TV broadcast.

“It was like a film that will play on repeat forever,” Inter Miami coach Tata Martino said. “It’s almost like he’s giving everything to write a new film … he is always there to write films.”

On Messi’s first day at the Inter Miami training facility, he was the first player to arrive.

Photographers waited along the street to capture images of him pulling up to work in an Audi SUV. Autograph seekers rushed to the car to get a scribble across their jersey or soccer ball. Just one other Inter Miami player arrived around the same time, at 7 a.m.: homegrown midfielder Benjamin Cremaschi, an Argentine-American and Miami native who is 18 years Messi’s junior.

The next day, however, a few other teammates got there just as early.

“He’s setting the tone,” Mas said. “And I think that’s important.”

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Messi is living just 10 minutes away from the training facility, Mas said, and he has worked quickly not just to integrate himself into the team, but to try to be a leader. These types of anecdotes — first into the facility, last out of it — aren’t new to fans of MLS who have heard stories of other big-name designated players establishing a new standard within their respective teams. Thierry Henry famously slide-tackled a New York Red Bulls player who tried to embarrass a veteran teammate in a small-sided game. Kaká’s gym sessions before Orlando City practices influenced younger players on that team to show up early and get in extra work next to one of their idols.

It is a peripheral benefit to the celebrity and in-game quality those players bring to teams. Yes, they can win games the way Messi did on Friday night. But the moments hidden away from cameras and crowds can also influence the ceiling of a team.

For the star players who are adjusting to a new country, new culture and a different level of play, putting in work around the training fields and in the gym is the easiest way to make connections with new teammates. The hope is that it’s also an indication of how seriously they are taking their stints in MLS.

The dynamics inside the locker room can be a bit more complicated when someone like Messi joins a team. How can they not be? The gulf between a typical MLS locker room and the greatest player who ever lived is a large one. Stories have started to emerge of Messi trying to iron out that strangeness and fit in as just “one of the guys.”

Broadcaster Kaylyn Kyle said Messi stayed after training with Sergio Busquets last week to work with some of the team’s young academy prospects. The club’s staff has talked in a surprised way about how friendly he has been with everyone from the young players to the office workers. Ahead of one training session, Messi got a good giggle in the locker room when some of his teammates pointed out he had put on a training bib backwards. They were nervous at first about whether to point it out, but soon realized he could take the joke. The WhatsApp group chat appearance was another example.

Cremaschi said Friday night it was too soon to comment much about Messi’s WhatsApp tendencies after only four or five days.

Does he use stickers?

“No, no, I don’t know,” Cremaschi said, with a chuckle.

As the team works to adjust to new realities, things around the group have changed to accommodate Messi’s arrival. On game days, Inter Miami players and staff used to meet at the team’s training facility and then walk across the parking lot to DRV PNK, with fans lined up in a sort of corridor to support them as they went to the stadium. That’s no longer possible due to security reasons. Now, the team uses a bus for the few-hundred-yard commute. They did a dry run in the final home game before Messi’s arrival and then used the bus against Cruz Azul.

Messi and Busquets did not come out to warm up as substitutes ahead of the game, as they normally would. Instead, they stayed inside in a room where they had space to stretch and get loose without worrying about any security issues before the game. The pair did finally warm up on the field at halftime and again during the second half near the corner flag.

Security guards filled the loading dock at the stadium before, during and after the game on Friday night. They also circled the field at halftime when Messi warmed up with the substitutes. This was for good reason; three people were detained for attempting to run on the pitch on Friday night and were taken to the security office at the stadium.

Things feel different on non-matchdays too, with more security guards everywhere, a police car in the parking lot and an armed guard patrolling up and down inside the training facility just next to the gym. It wasn’t long ago that a social-media prankster was able to walk right into the training complex after claiming to be a Dutch player there on trial.

In many ways, all of the Inter Miami universe now centers around the 36-year-old legend. There was, perhaps, no better example of that than when Messi stood on the sideline, ready to enter the game as a substitute on Friday night. Around the building, fans stood and cheered in anticipation. They all lifted their phones to capture the moment. Messi stood near the fourth official waiting to enter the game. Behind him in the field-level suites, even LeBron James, Serena Williams and Kim Kardashian couldn’t resist. They had their phones out, too.

Exactly 40 minutes and 33 seconds after he first stepped onto the pitch, Messi’s left foot struck the free kick and showed why everyone’s cameras are trained on him. But after the game, he provided yet another example of the efforts he’s making to simply be a part of the group.

During his post-game interview, Messi turned the spotlight to a 20-year-old teammate, Ian Fray, who had earlier in the night left the game in tears with what would later be diagnosed as his third ACL tear in three years. Fray, from Coconut Creek, Florida, just a few miles north of the stadium, had signed a homegrown deal as an 18-year-old prospect in 2021 but missed the entire 2021 and 2022 seasons due to the previous injuries. The defender pounded the turf with his fist after going down injured in the first half. Another season — and a chance to play alongside Messi — taken away by yet another devastating injury.

“I want to dedicate this game to Ian, who was suffering in the locker room because of the injury,” Messi said in his interview on the field. “He already suffered two serious injuries and was out a long time and now has the bad luck to suffer another injury, we believe it’s serious again, and I want to send him a lot of strength. He’s a young kid who will definitely recover and be back with us again, and hopefully as soon as possible.”

Fray later shared an image on his Instagram of the rest of the team in the locker room, gathered around the legend that joined their ranks this month.

Messi was holding up Fray’s jersey.

Behind the scenes in the MLS and Inter Miami offices, the 10 days leading up to Messi’s debut were frantic ones.

In the month since Messi announced his intention to join Inter Miami, MLS deputy commissioner Gary Stevenson had staged what he calls “hot-list meetings.” He had done the same thing to get the league through its COVID pause and restart, and for other major projects at MLS, as well as at other stops in his career, which included the Pac-12, NBA, Golf Network and PGA Tour. The daily meetings bring people together from around the company to troubleshoot and synchronize all that needs to happen.

Messi’s impending arrival had many moving parts. The process itself was frustrating to those involved, but there was also an understanding of why there were more difficulties than normal. Many of the parties involved had spent their entire careers working in European football, not in MLS. That added a layer of difficulty, as the single-entity function of the league is inherently different from anywhere else in the world. Player contracts, for example, are officially with MLS, not with specific clubs.

“It was education and negotiation,” one source, who asked for anonymity to protect his position, told The Athletic.

Several law firms were involved in getting Messi’s contract drawn up and agreed upon. The tax issues were complex. More lawyers were needed for immigration purposes, as the league worked to get visas sorted out.

“Whenever you have dozens of lawyers involved, things go on high alert,” Mas joked. “At least for me.”

The logistics of Messi’s introduction needed to be figured out, too — both on the ground in Miami and with Apple, the league’s new broadcast partner who played a key financial role in bringing Messi to Miami. And there were hard deadlines in place. Miami announced the player’s introduction for July 16. His first game was set to be on July 21.

With so many moving parts and so much up in the air, there was a layer of chaos to the work.

“You just didn’t know when you were going to get certain answers,” Stevenson said. “And when you got an answer, then you had to work. So you might get an answer at two in the morning, you might get an answer at five in the morning, you might get an answer at 11. So then you had to work, just because the timing forces you to then focus on it.”

Even just announcing Messi officially as an Inter Miami player was not smooth. The league was told to prepare for a potential official announcement as early as July 3. Then it was July 5, and then July 6. And then July 7. For more than a week, there was almost a daily ritual of preparing for an announcement that wouldn’t come until July 15, a far-from-ideal Saturday afternoon press release when most of the world wasn’t necessarily paying attention.

In Fort Lauderdale and Coral Gables at the team facility and front office, respectively, the whirlwind of activity started when Mas first got the call on June 7 that Messi was coming — and it had not stopped. The team was working to get the contract terms over the line, but it also had to prepare for Messi’s arrival and life in the U.S., and also on striking deals with a new coach, Martino, and other players joining Messi at Inter Miami. The team also had ongoing negotiations with multiple contractors it was hiring to help on things like game day operations — those security guards that lined the field, and more — and it also had to establish other new protocols. Messi, for example, has had police escorts on his drives to and from the facility.

“There have been a dozen different workflows going on — from the most minute detail to make sure that when Leo arrives here to the training center — that is done with the professionalism and class that David and I aspire to,” Mas said. “That he feels at home, from housing to his children’s school. Every single detail. There’s absolutely not one thing that we have not thought out or been preparing for Leo Messi’s arrival here, and the beginning of this new era.”

Once Messi was in the U.S., the pressures were ramped up. Messi arrived in Florida on July 11 after a family vacation in the Bahamas. He was spotted out and about around Miami, eating dinner at local restaurants and shopping at a Publix. The team, however, couldn’t put anything official out until the contract was agreed. That wouldn’t happen for another four days.

That day, the Mas, Beckham and Messi families got together.

“We had a beautiful lunch on Saturday and we spent all afternoon together to welcome him to our beautiful city,” Mas said.

It may have been the lone calm moment of the weekend for Inter Miami’s owners. Around 500 media members were credentialed for “The Unveil” event Inter Miami staged. A rainstorm caused havoc at the stadium, sending fans running for cover. Videos showed some fans storming past stadium gates to try to find respite from the winds and rain. The storms were a nightmare for the presentation and the live broadcast on Apple. It flipped the order of events so that the concerts that were supposed to be the opener for Messi became the closing acts. The owners were soaked in their suits for the event. Beckham was slipping in his shoes and eventually abandoned the walkway, jumping onto the grass for a safer path back inside. It felt fitting for how hectic the preceding days had been.

“The moment that I arrived in the stadium and I look out and I’m seeing the winds and the rain and everything, I was like, ‘Of course. Of course,’” Beckham said. “It’s just another obstacle.”

The day-to-day volatility and commotion around Messi haven’t changed.

A press conference initially scheduled for Monday to introduce the notoriously media-shy Messi was “postponed”, with the Argentine reluctant to talk. A make-up date has yet to be provided. Last Tuesday’s training session brought another 200 media members out in the early morning humidity to watch 15 minutes of Messi working with his teammates for the first time. On Wednesday, Mas flew up to make a presentation to the MLS board of governors in Washington D.C. An hour or so after the meeting let out, he was huddled around a table in the hotel with people working on yet another deal. The work had not stopped.

“The last week has been a tremendous whirlwind,” Mas said. “It’s been crazy.”

When Messi’s free kick hit the back of the net on Friday night, however, it made all the madness worth it.

It was a reminder Beckham said he got earlier in the week when he arrived at the stadium for the unveiling. So much drama had unfolded over the previous years and months with Inter Miami. Even the way Messi announced he was coming to the U.S. felt surreal. The sheer amount of work behind the scenes after Messi arrived had been overwhelming.

It was easy to get lost in it all and miss the significance of the moment.

“When we knew Leo had landed, when we knew it was real and when we knew he was real, that for us was a moment, it was a proud moment,” Beckham said. “I drove into the stadium the other day and I saw the people and I got quite emotional. I had my wife next to me, I had my kids in the back and they were like ‘Daddy, look at all these people. This is amazing.’ And my wife was like, ‘It’s amazing what one man can do, what one player can do.’ And that’s the power of Lionel Messi.

“We all dream of bringing the greatest players. It doesn’t always happen. But for us, it just has.”

(Top photo: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)