Major League Something
Turns out the recently crowned European champion, a team that routed an Inter Milan outfit celebrated for its defensive stability and technical acumen, is a little bit better than a Major League Soccer team made up of players who haven't seen their prime since Harry and Meghan were still welcome at Buckingham Palace.
You're not surprised. Neither am I. Will that stop the teeth gnashing over the place of MLS in the hierarchy of world soccer leagues? Hahahaha. Clearly not.
It definitely feels like PSG could have dropped a few more on the lone MLS team to make the knockout phase of Gentleman Gianni's Farcical Football Circus, but after posting a four-spot going into the halftime break, they clearly saw no reason to exert themselves. 4-0 at half, 4-0 at the final whistle. Miami can get back to the business of deciding whether they're a half-decent MLS team with a chance to win a championship or a retirement halfway house for a bunch of Lionel Messi's boludos.
There are tactical things to talk about, like this observation from Matthew Tiberius Doyle over on Bluesky...
The fact that it took 45 minutes for Miami to realize Messi needed to drop into the midfield to get touches is damning of either Mascherano (didn't realize) or Messi (refused until it was already 4-0) and that's the story of this game.
— Matthew Doyle (@mattdoyle.bsky.social) June 29, 2025 at 1:11 PM
...but I'm not all that interested. When the gap in quality is obvious and explicable, I don't see much point in dissecting in-game choices made by a neophyte coach and/or his indulged boss, er, superstar.
Let's come back to "explicable". Few were under any illusions that Inter Miami could hang with PSG because the money spent on the respective squads is so vastly different. Even if Luis Enrique's team didn't nuke Inter Milan at the Champions League final last month, the idea that Inter Miami could beat such an insanely expensive team made up of world-class players would have been laughable.
I mean, it was laughable? For some reason, everyone is pretending the Miami performance or the scoreline means something. Something about MLS and its present and (more importantly) its future.
I land squarely in the "MLS owners need to be more aggressive" space in this American soccer game of Risk, so I'm happy to use the end of Miami's run as evidence that the league needs to kick off its Forrest Gump leg braces and start sprinting. We're 30 years into this thing with MLS having achieved more than anyone back in 1996 could have imagined. The wisdom of the move to Apple and the walled garden of soccer is up for debate, but there's no reason to believe MLS is in financial danger.
Either you want to rank among the best leagues in the world—not just in abstract, but in reality—or you don't.
Miami is actually the perfect embodiment of the MLS moment. Inte is a team with a number of stars, one of them the most famous player on the player and the others former Champions League winners, surrounded by players several steps down the quality ladder. Inter was good enough last year to set an MLS points record but with no room under the rules to build on that success, has taken a significant step back.
It's a fascinating thought experiment to try and pinpoint where on the scale the age of Messi and his friends drags down their ability so that younger but less talented players meet them in overall effectiveness for a senior professional men's outdoor soccer player.
But the upshot, wherever that meeting occurs, is that Miami's roster spans such a wide range of quality that while a few of its players might be good enough to hang with PSG for 45 or 60 minutes, much of its squad has no hope of keeping up that level for even the opening 15 minutes. MLS doesn't provide its more ambitious teams the ability to surround the big names the league still wants to attract from Europe later in their careers with players capable of maximizing their talent.
MLS has always talked out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to ambition. The stated public goal is worldwide relevancy but it fails to do what is necessary to give itself a chance to reach that goal. The league has always wanted to climb the ranks of leagues while sticking to its (evolving) conservative spending plan. What I can't figure out is if all of that bluster was meant to snow the fan base or of league leadership really believed it was possible without taking more financial risks.
Seattle played pretty well in three losses against three very difficult opponents. LAFC failed against a Tunisian opponent, which stinks, but that felt more like a failure of coaching an approach to the game than evidence of anything about where MLS ranks compared to the Tunisian first division.
Let's just say that MLS is what we thought it was and move on.
We all knew Inter Miami was going to get embarrassed. Acting otherwise, or taking the PSG win as some sort of revelatory commentary on MLS and its place in the world, feels like some pretty bad faith.