On Sunday Lionel Messi, Argentine world champion and seven-time Ballon d’Or winner, was presented to the fans of Inter Miami, the US soccer team he is expected to play for until at least 2025. The presentation ceremony was held in the stadium club, about fifty kilometers from downtown Miami. It was raining very heavily, and even though the stadium has an overall small capacity (20,000 people), the welcome was understandably very warm.
The unveiling ceremony was meant to be for both Messi and Sergio Busquets, another player recently signed from Inter Miami and Messi’s long-time teammate at Barcelona. But Busquets only thanked the club briefly before making way for Messi, who showed up wearing a number 10 shirt. After much cheering and fireworks, he too spoke to the audience, briefly and in Spanish.
His engagement with Inter Miami had been known since the end of June, when he himself announced it in an interview. Messi has just turned 36, most of which he spent at Barcelona. In 2021 he had moved to Paris Saint-Germain due to the Spanish team’s economic problems, but things didn’t go well in Paris. In addition to individual performances far from what he had accustomed the fans to, last May, shortly before the expiry of his contract, he was temporarily suspended due to an unauthorized trip to Saudi Arabia, where it seemed he had decided to continue his career .
Despite the higher offer made to him by Saudi Arabia, Messi chose to play in the United States. Inter Miami was founded in 2018, started playing in 2020 and its majority owner is Jorge Mas, an entrepreneur of Cuban origin who deals with telecommunications, and his brother José. The former British footballer David Beckham, who was among the first world-famous footballers to go and play in Major League Soccer, the North American professional football league founded in 1993, also has shares. Before Messi, Inter Miami had another great Argentinian footballer, Gonzalo Higuain, former Real Madrid, Naples and Juventus striker.
Messi’s debut with Inter Miami is scheduled for Friday 21 July in the Leagues Cup, a parallel tournament played by Mexican and North American teams. The actual championship, on the other hand, is already over halfway through and will end in October. Right now Inter Miami are last in one of the two conference (the eastern one) in which the season is divided. If he does not recover at least 12 points in the remaining twelve games of the regular season he will not be able to qualify for the playoffs, the decisive phase of the championship. In this situation, therefore, Messi could help change things, also because he will find the former Argentine coach of Barcelona, Gerardo Martino, who also coached him in the national team.
According to Jorge Mas, for football in Miami and in general in the United States there will be “a before and after” Messi. For now there has been talk above all of his impact on the commercial aspects of the championship, given that two large companies such as Adidas and Apple have already played an influential role in his transfer. The Argentinian world champion is in fact sponsored by Adidas, which is also the sole supplier of technical material for the MLS. Apple, on the other hand, just this year obtained the rights to broadcast the championship for the next ten years via its Apple TV+ platform, and to advertise its offer it will immediately be able to count on the presence of one of the most famous players in the history of football.
For Messi, however, the Major League could also represent an impetus from a purely sporting point of view. Even though he recently won the World Cup with Argentina, which was the last major goal of his career, the years at Paris Saint-Germain were rather disappointing. At 36, the best is over, but in a lower middle-level championship like the North American one, his quality can still alone make the difference, shift the balance and generate new interest.
All of this Messi will also be able to do in Florida, the US state with the largest Argentine community. Furthermore, Miami has long been considered a sort of unofficial capital of Latin America in the United States: about 70 percent of the people living in the city have Hispanic origins and compared to other US cities, interest in soccer is very widespread. It is probable that Messi also took these factors into consideration when he chose to go and play there, in addition to the fact that according to sources cited by the New York Times has several real estate properties in an area already widely frequented and appreciated by many famous football players.
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