Lionel Messi is making MLS look silly. Is that really good for U.S. soccer?
Lionel Messi is coming to New Jersey this weekend, and if you’re a soccer fan, I hope you have great seats at Red Bull Arena. I hope you can bring the kids to Harrison and show them the greatest player of this or maybe any generation, and I hope he puts on the kind of show that lives up the hype. He certainly has done that — and then some — since joining Major League Soccer with Inter Miami.
But I also hope you’ll be able to take a step back from Messipalooza long enough to accept a greatly underreported truth about this whole thing.
This is not good for American soccer.
If we’re really being honest? It’s kind of embarrassing. Messi’s first month in the MLS has played out like NBA superstar Kevin Durant tipping off against a junior varsity basketball team, or like track phenom Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone racing a bunch of kindergartners around an elementary school track. It’s a lot of fun to watch, for sure, but it’s been waaaaay too easy.
Messi was dropped on a last-place Inter Miami team that had five wins and 22 goals before his arrival. That same team has seven wins and 22 goals in the just seven games since he pulled on the uniform, with Messi scoring 10 times in that stretch while leading Miami to a Leagues Cup title. That is partly because he is freakin’ brilliant, of course. What he did this week in leading Miami over Cincinnati in a U.S. Open Cup semifinal was wonderful theater.
But his dominance is also shining a bright spotlight on the quality of play in the league he just joined, and what we’re seeing isn’t pretty.
No one can slow him down. The Athletic wrote that Messi “strolled across a vast expanse of empty Florida grasslands” before scoring one of his goals, and then scored another after dribbling up the field “without an opponent so much as gesturing in his general direction.” I’m no Trent Crimm, and this is not The Independent, but I think the writer was trying to convey that MLS defenses are lousy.
This is no surprise. The MLS has long put a premium on importing expensive stars — French soccer icon Thierry Henry and the Red Bulls, for example — and surrounding them with less heralded (or, to put it less politely, dirt cheap) teammates.
Soccer is the one professional sport that American fans know, when they buy tickets for the top U.S. league, that they’re not getting the world’s best version of that sport. They are, for the most part, okay with that. The best players want to play for Manchester City or Real Madrid, where the tradition and paychecks are unrivaled. Why wouldn’t they?
MLS, though, is supposed to be just a rung below that — and closing the gap. I once had a chance to interview the last megasuperhuge soccer star to invade our shores, David Beckham, during a media blitz in New York, and two things about that very unexpected 10-minute exclusive stick with me.
1. He was wearing the whitest T-shirt I had ever seen, one that quite possibly cost more than every piece of clothing I have owned or ever will own combined.
2. He seemed convinced that, by playing for the L.A. Galaxy at the end of his career, he had helped usher in a new era for American professional soccer.
“It’s going to take more than three or four years to make this league a top league that competes with the rest of the world,” Beckham told me. “But I believe it will happen. In 10, 15, 20 years, this league will be a league that competes with some of the best in the world.”
That was July 2011, so it is still early in Beckham’s 10-to-20-year window. Now, as the co-owner who helped lure Messi to Miami and one of the chief beneficiaries of his nightly brilliance, Beckham will no doubt see his arrival as a smashing success.
But as a competitor who once performed at the highest level, doesn’t he ever cringe a little bit at the fawning treatment?
When Messi led Inter Miami to a victory over Nashville in the Leagues Cup Final, one of the top players on the Nashville team, Dax McCarty, held up Messi’s game-worn jersey on a social media post the next day with this caption: “The night wasn’t a total loss.” This isn’t quite to the level of overmatched opponents asking for the Dream Team’s autographs at the 1992 Olympics, but it’s still cringy.
Can you get a yellow card for genuflecting?
Meanwhile, the 11th-place Red Bulls are hoping to use their much-heralded academy in East Hanover to build an MLS Cup winner one of these years. It would be demoralizing for longtime fans if this left-for-dead Inter Miami team wins one this season because it threw a bag of cash at a generational player, even if he puts on a show this weekend.
Again, I can’t blame anyone for getting excited to watch the G.O.A.T. perform. The Red Bulls accountants certainly are, with savvy planning turning Messi’s arrival into a “multi-million-dollar increase” in ticket revenue, according to general manager Marc de Grandpre. The GM gets that Messi has dominated so far, but he wants fans to wait for a bigger sample size.
“I think the beauty of it is, it’s going to challenge all of us across the league to continue to improve the quality of our rosters and elevate the play on the pitch,” de Grandpre said. “We have really good soccer players in this league, really good teams, and I think it’s not going to be as always as rosy as it’s been for his first seven matches as he continues to progress in MLS.”
The Red Bulls are averaging 17,346 fans a game this season, just 24th in the 29-team league. They’ll fill every nook and cranny of that place on Saturday night, with tickets fetching Super Bowl-level prices on the secondary market. Many fans will be rooting for the visiting team, but the Red Bulls can do MLS a favor if they find a way to shut down you-know-who.
“The attention that we get with all that is happening, it becomes a circus,” Orlando City coach Oscar Pareja said after Messi scored twice to beat his team earlier this month. That’s not all bad, of course. Circuses are wonderful events that everyone remembers. Circuses are fun!
Circuses also leave town.
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Staff writer Brian Fonseca contributed to this column.
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Steve Politi may be reached at [email protected].
