Yes, Messi is brilliant. But if you want to know where MLS is heading, watch the kids
The kick that put Inter Miami through to the quarter-finals of the Leagues Cup wasn’t from Lionel Messi. It didn’t come off the boot of Sergio Busquets or Jordi Alba, who hadn’t even played particularly well against FC Dallas.
Instead of the household names, it was a skinny, mop-headed teenager who fired a shootout penalty into the corner of the net to save his superstar pals the indignity of getting knocked out of a tournament they had probably never heard of a couple of weeks ago.
Benjamin Cremaschi (top image), 18 years old and looking less like a professional athlete than a TikTok star who had stumbled onto the pitch fresh from a high school pep rally, was the hero the TV cameras chased at full-time for an interview. And that — even more than Messi making brains explode — is the future that MLS wants.
Messi was otherworldly, of course. At this point, that’s less a sentence in a match report than a law of nature. Tattoo it on your biceps, in case you forget. Hire a plane to scrawl it in billowing cursive over the Dallas skyline. This guy just doesn’t exist in the same dimension as the rest of us.
His first touch of the game was an absurd 40-yard through ball.
His second was a classic Messi goal, kissed into the bottom left corner from the top of the box off an Alba cutback.
One of his last touches was a free-kick goal even more perfect than the first one he scored as an MLS player, two long weeks ago, back when we were still wondering whether he would bother with greatness in a league that’s beneath him, playing with team-mates who wouldn’t have been qualified to clean his boots at Barcelona or Paris Saint-Germain.
Silly question, it turned out. Being great has never bothered him at all.
But if you think MLS belongs to ageing stars such as Messi, take another look at his team-mates. Better yet, look at plucky Dallas, the team that took Miami’s party barge of Barcelona legends down to the wire. One thing you will notice is that a lot of these guys are really young. Another is that some of them might be pretty decent at football.
The most exciting goal of the game didn’t come from Messi, Busquets and Alba (average age: old enough to remember baggy cargo pants) but from Dallas’ young attackers Alan Velasco, Jesus Ferreira and Bernard Kamungo (average age: young enough to wear them).
Velasco, a 21-year-old signed with Dallas for a club-record $7million (£5.48m at the current exchange rate) transfer fee from Argentina’s Independiente in February last year, sprung a counter-attack with a long slithery through ball into the path of Ferreira, 22, who graduated from Dallas’ academy and went on to play for the United States at last year’s World Cup.
Kamungo, the 21-year-old winger who finished off the move, doesn’t have their pedigree — he is a Tanzanian refugee who was discovered at a local open tryout — but you wouldn’t know it from his nasty swerve in the box to leave two defenders and the goalkeeper for dead. These kids can ball.
Together, those three players represent the different categories of young talent — expensive foreign prospects, academy products and other domestic recruits (usually drafted out of the U.S. college system) — that are increasingly becoming the heartbeat of MLS.
Despite what Messi Mania might make you think, the league has actually been getting more reliant on young players. Across the last two full seasons, MLS gave 15 per cent of its minutes to players 21 or younger — more than the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A or Bundesliga.
It’s true that MLS has always kept a certain contingent of old guys whose names fans are supposed to recognize. That’s important when trying to sell people tickets to watch a club they haven’t heard of in a league whose TV ratings have historically struggled against reruns of So You Think You Can Lumberjack? on ESPN 8 — The Ocho.
Every once in a while, MLS will land a name even your mom has heard of — a Thierry Henry, Andrea Pirlo or Zlatan Ibrahimovic — and the rest of the world will notice just long enough to feel confirmed in their suspicions that the North American league is a glorified shuffleboard community.
It’s actually pretty rare, though, for an MLS team to be built around famous players in their thirties.
When Toronto FC tried to pull an Inter Miami last year by searching Transfermarkt for out-of-work Italian national team players (no, seriously) and signing Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Bernardeschi, they promptly sank to the bottom of the league. When New York City FC tried to build a squad around Pirlo, Frank Lampard and David Villa a while back, that was a disaster, too.
If Messi and friends continue to steamroll MLS in their golden years, they will be the exception, not the rule.
But if Miami do keep winning, it will be in no small part because of their kids — the likes of Cremaschi and 20-year-old Paraguayan midfielder Diego Gomez, who have been running their tails off to cover for the old guys.
MLS’s salary cap and byzantine roster rules make it practically mandatory for a squad to include some young talent, and when you are playing in places like Dallas in August, where temperatures are significantly hotter than they were at the Qatar World Cup, it’s a necessity. Like the population of south Florida itself, Miami’s squad is equal parts Saturday brunch crowd and 4pm buffet dinners.
In the last couple of years, MLS has moved to formalise its youth movement with a new roster mechanism called the U22 Initiative, which allows clubs to spend more money on their squad as long as it goes toward young players who might help MLS along the way to become a selling league. That rule is how Miami could afford to sign Gomez and other young Latin American talents at the same time as Messi, Alba and Busquets.
So far, the league-wide success of these signings is mixed, though, and it’s not clear that most MLS clubs’ sporting departments have the resources and knowledge to uncover value in countries that have already been picked over by dozens of bigger, richer European scouting operations.
The bigger, more transformative change has come from ramping up investment in youth academies like the one at FC Dallas, which has earned a reputation for producing talents including Ferreira, Juventus midfielder Weston McKennie and Dutch club PSV Eindhoven’s striker Ricardo Pepi, two more U.S. internationals. When top European clubs raid MLS — which is happening more and more these days — it’s usually not established prospects like Velasco and Gomez that they are after. It’s homegrown teenagers like Cremaschi.
Messi will keep being Messi. He is well worth tuning into MLS for. But if you want to know where the league is headed, stop looking at the stars for a minute and watch the kids.
(Top photo: Alex Bierens de Haan/Getty Images)
