OK, show of hands. How many of you knew that Lionel Messi – a global superstar who has committed to spend his next three years in the United States – just completed the best individual season in Major League Soccer history?
Be honest.
Most people will be vaguely unsurprised by this news. You’re aware that the greatest soccer player of all time is winding down his career in North America, playing for whichever one has those pink kits that dot the planet like a beautiful toxic slime mold. Context-free highlights drift past the periphery of your consciousness, floating on the algorithm, and you heard a rumor the kids have started calling Messi “braceman” because he scores two goals every game. Which, yeah, of course he does. He’s Messi.
Even among MLS diehards, Messi’s campaign seems oddly underappreciated. He won the Golden Boot and tied for most assists despite missing a quarter of the season, setting new records for non-penalty goals and goal contributions along the way. According to American Soccer Analysis’s advanced goals added metric, he added twice as much value over the average player as second-place Denis Bouanga and left Carlos Vela’s 2019, the previous best MLS campaign ever, in the dust. In spite of it all, chatter around the league as recently as last month was that maybe, just maybe, San Diego’s Anders Dreyer or Cincinnati’s Evander would be a more deserving MVP.
Which brings us to the more important question: So what if Messi is tearing up MLS – does anyone actually give a crud?
Supporters of opposing teams have reasons not to. After the thrill of seeing him in person (or selling that ticket to pay for the rest of the season) wore off, all that was left was dutiful acknowledgment of his greatness and creeping resentment of his intrusion on a niche fandom. The same league that cancelled a fan-favorite podcast and replaced writers with AI can still find plenty of room in the budget to plaster Messi’s face everywhere, but the competitive balance that used to be a point of pride went out the window when one team spent more than double the average wage bill to assemble a Barcelona legends tour.
There’s also plenty of evidence that your average American sports fan isn’t using Messi as a gateway to MLS as much as anticipated. League executives once predicted that Messi mania and next year’s World Cup would “double our fanbase by 2026, then we double it and double it again.” Instead, average regular season attendance has dipped 5.5% year-on-year as MLS continues to lose ground to European competitions in the American soccer boom. On Thursday, MLS boasted that its total weekly viewership for all matches had gone up 29%, but that could just as easily be explained by the increase in streaming and international linear deals the league signed between the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
Google searches for Messi in the United States still trail Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays in Saudi Arabia, and spent the summer lagging behind the WNBA player Caitlin Clark, who has broken into the national sports conversation in a way MLS can only envy.
Yes, the rest of the world still loves Messi. Millions of people watch his Inter Miami highlights and click on his name in headlines. No, they don’t appear to have been converted into rabid MLS aficionados. League commissioner Don Garber offered up some ambiguous numbers earlier this year to support the claim that viewership is up “almost 50% compared to last year,” then added that it wasn’t “where we need to be.” Although Messi’s contract reportedly included a cut of streaming revenue from the MLS Season Pass package on Apple, the league announced this week that it will make playoff games free to all Apple TV subscriberssuggesting that model hasn’t quite worked out.
after newsletter promotion
If there was any hope the whole “Lionel Messi, Florida man” thing would become a broader cultural phenomenon, there’s not much sign of it yet. Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham brought soccer into the entertainment mainstream, racking up 418,000 and 24,000 reviews on IMDb, respectively. Apple’s glossy Messi Meets America docuseries has 458 reviews. No, that’s not missing a comma.
The problem is there’s not much of a story here. Messi is supposed to dominate MLS. When he succeeds, it’s because he plays in what the world still thinks of, however unfairly, as a “retirement league.” When he and his Barcelona pals sometimes struggle – Inter Miami only finished third in the Eastern Conference this year – well, what do you expect? They’re practically retired. There’s no narrative that can capture the imagination, just a weekly clip show of otherworldly goals that seem to exist outside any real competitive context, even for fans of the competition.
Maybe the MLS playoffs can still give this experiment some juice. America loves a knockout tournament, and the closest Messi has come to conquering the world’s biggest sports market remains those magical first few weeks when Inter Miami won a mostly meaningless Leagues Cup in 2023. Or maybe he’ll turn back the clock at next summer’s World Cup and remind people that every minute he has left on the pitch is still must-watch TV.
It seems more likely at this point, even after his extension, that Messi’s stint in Miami will pass into history as a half-forgotten footnote to a legendary career, leaving MLS with a handful of new records but no real transformative change.
