The Miami Slide
But Messi, a bad guy? That's also about resentment. MLS fans, many of whom have followed the league and their clubs for years, resent that the league orbits the Messi star 30 years after its founding.
Back at the newsletter for the first time in awhile, thanks largely to regular life things (I had a vacation!) but also because of a self-defeating tendency to take on a little too much. I'm holding 63 different things in my head at the moment and 62 of them are complete and total nonsense. The problem is that I'm just not very good at figuring out which one is worthwhile.
I think Morning Kickaround is worthwhile. Have a look, subscribe, support our endeavor to cover American soccer stories in a live format three times a week.
The Best Soccer Show is decent, and fun, and different. We'll be live tonight (Thursday, May 22) at 9 PM Eastern to talk about the Gold Cup roster. No Pulisic or Musah is a bummer.
Let's take a crack at this writing thing and see how it pans out. Today's topic: Inter Miami, or if you're nasty, Club Internacional Fútbol de Miami.
The Herons look for all the world like a team in a death spiral. The losses are piling up and while that might be less worrying if those defeats could be attributed to a run of bad luck or a couple of bad days at the office, the underlying numbers suggest Jorge Mas and David Beckham's project is nearing explosive earth impact.
Even when Miami scores, the Herons concede so many goals it hardly matters. In their last seven games getting regular mention in every tweet, skeet, and commentary on the club because they've only to managed to avoid defeat twice in that span (a 4-1 home win over the Red Bulls and a 3-3 away draw with San Jose), Inter Miami has shipped 20 goals. 20!
I'll just lean on the inimitable Joe Lowery here and let him sum up the on-field situation with Miami and then get into what I think is really interesting about Miami's real-time collapse (at least to me).
Complaining at one end (after a correct no-call), conceding at the other. You can't find a clearer summary of Inter Miami's defensive work in 2025 than this goal from Luis Muriel that put Miami down 1-0 against Orlando City. Traffic cone stuff!
— Joseph Lowery (@joeclowery.bsky.social) May 18, 2025 at 8:10 PM
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On one end, Messi moaning over not getting a call that no professional referee will ever make, and on the other, a defensive catastrophe that allowed Luis Muriel a free path to a opening Orlando goal. Set up and punchline. FOLKS!
That episode in Orlando, during Rivalry Week, no less, got further attention because Messi doubled down on his MLS refereeing complaints by speaking to MLS Season Pass reporter Michele Giannone on the field after the game.
“From there came their long pass and the goal,” Messi said, en español, about the non-call on the back pass. “Sometimes there are errors in critical moments. It happened in the last game, too. Those aren’t excuses, but there are always issues with referees and I think MLS has to look at some of the officiating.”
Messi also claimed the referee didn't know the back pass rule which seems...unlikely.
Worth noting that the MLS Disciplinary Committee declined to fine Messi for his on-air comments. That's odd considering how quick the league usually is to smack players and coaches down for public criticism of the referees. It's going to be hard to convince people that preferential treatment wasn't at play.
Added to his confrontation with ref Joe Dickerson in San Jose in midweek, the comments to Giannone mean we've got a pattern forming. The greatest soccer player any of us will ever see is showing signs of cracking under the stress. Going after Dickerson was a bad look. Publicly calling on MLS to "look" at the officiating is maybe not worse, but because he so rarely speaks to reporters after matches, it feels more weighty.
We can maybe give the emotional reaction a pass. But the intentional, conscious choice to seek out a microphone and complain for the world to hear? Hmm.
If he is feeling pressure, it's not just because he's Lionel Messi and he's used to winning. This is his team, in every way that matters. The two off-field figures most responsible for last year's record-setting regular season, Tata Martino and Chris Henderson, took exits rather than stick around for the remaking of the club to Messi's liking. If Martino's replacement Javier Mascherano is doing anything of substance as head coach he's doing a terrible job, though it's very possible Messi's former Barcelona and Argentina teammate is just a figurehead and glorified cheerleader.
Henderson's replacement is another Friend of Messi from the old days. That guy just signed Jordi Alba to a contract extension despite clear signs that Alba is providing diminishing returns (particularly on the defensive side of the ball). Thirty-eight-year-old Friend of Messi and howler-in-waiting Oscar Ustari is entrenched as the club's number one goalkeeper thanks to Drake Callender's sports hernia surgery.
I could go on, but a lot of this you already know. The team is a mess from a roster perspective and even the 10-day bonus transfer window the Club World Cup clubs will get in early June can't save this listing ship. One can't help but wonder if some of Messi's public frustration over referees is coming from a looming dread about Miami's foray into the CWC. Maybe he's dreading getting embarassed by Al-Ahly.
The intriguing twist in this plot is how the greater MLS public seems to be responding to Miami's crash and Messi's behavior. I'm not suggesting Messi isn't still incredibly popular, particularly among the more casual US-based soccer fan, but it's undeniable that for most hardcore MLS fans, Inter Miami and Messi are the bad guys. Messi's "whining" (which isn't really new, but has taken on a different dimension amidst the slide) only makes it easier to root against them.
You can cut the online schadenfruede with a knife.
The fact that the league's highest profile club (a status it held even before Messi's arrival thanks to Beckham's presence as founder/owner/handsome-man-lurking-in-the-background and Mas's capture of the club as a vehicle for his ego and politics) is viewed as villainous is hardly surprising. Every league has an evil empire, whether that's down to winning or a perceived unfair advantage. Remember that Inter Miami got caught breaking the league's salary budget rules in the pre-Messi era and even his influence on the image of the club as the genius artista of futbol that he is won't wash away that stain.
Backlash against the jacked-up ticket prices for any Messi away trip and the pink-clad fans that dots stadiums for those games is at the heart of this as well.
But Messi, a bad guy? That's also about resentment. MLS fans, many of whom have followed the league and their clubs for years, resent that the league orbits the Messi star 30 years after its founding. They resent that so much attention is given to a single player on a single club, no matter who he is. They resent that if there is any attention given to the league outside of the limited American soccer bubble, Messi and Miami are the ones that get it.
They resent that soccer fans in their communities ignored the local MLS team until Messi showed up. Messi is getting ire deflecting off the plastic.
Still, it's hard to blame MLS for trying to leverage everything it can out of the presence of MLS on North American soil. But since a lot of why it needs to rely so much on Messi to sell the league is down to choices the league leadership made over the course of a couple of decades, the resentment is also a function of frustration.
MLS isn't mainstream and it feels like the window has closed on the chance it could ever be. Why it's not mainstream after 30 years is complicated—soccer's place in the sports hierarchy, competition from foreign leagues for fan attention, and of course, the manner in which MLS directs coverage around it.
At least I began covering the league as a writer and podcaster, MLS has carefully managed messaging. A league starved for coverage, especially after the hype wave created by Beckham's arrival in 2007 subsided, acted too much like a product that didn't need smaller, independent outlets. When it became clear that no sizeable third party sports news outlet was going to treat MLS seriously and that a culture of discussion wasn't forming around it in national channels, the league launched an editorial department to do that work.
Even if it didn't intend to, that meant that anyone who wasn't working for MLSSoccer.com was a second-class citizen when it came to reach. Driving fans to the league's website had the knock on effect of syphoning attention from people trying to get standup outlets to cover the sport in the US off the ground (at a time when the advertising model was still viable). The league ate up clicks and sponsors, limiting the ability of independent outlets to make a real go of covering it sustainably.
A lot happened in the intervening years. While I don't want to gloss over further developments in the media world (pivot to video, anyone?), I also don't want to bore you. Let's just say that MLS didn't breakthrough and that it augured the future that we're living in now.
Is it possible that getting national Big Four-style coverage was never going to happen for MLS, regardless of the decisions the league took? Absolutely. MLS is also a victim of timing: it just happened to come along as our attention spans fractured into a million pieces and access to more celebrated, higher quality soccer leagues exploded.
A boon for the carpetbaggers (you know who I mean). Not so much for American club soccer.
Now MLS exists in an even smaller box than the one forced upon it by all of the circumstances outlined above. By retreating behind the paywall, the league made a desperate bid to break free of the limitations of its status in the zeitgeist. Dressed up as a "bold move" that looks ahead to an all-streaming one-world future, that choice also pushed the walls around it higher and made it that much more difficult for it to matter outside of AppleTV.
There's no grist for the mill, I guess is what I'm saying. The grist that does appear, like Messi's interactions with the referees, gets occluded by the rules of self-coverage. Alexander Abnos wrote a thought-provoking piece on that problem at The Guardian and then chatted with me about it on Morning Kickaround.
Messi and Inter Miami becomig objects of ire, the villains of MLS, is manna from heaven for a soccer league that needs all the attention it can get. In the Spanish-language media, Messi antics are generating heat. It's too bad we can't say the same for English coverage here in the United States.