After the Argentine superstar failed to rescue Inter Miami’s league campaign, questions surfaced about how he might spend the offseason.The first season of Inter Miami’s Lionel Messi project was all going to plan.
The greatest player of his generation was banging in goals, driving subscriptions to Major League Soccer matches on Apple TV and selling out stadiums wherever he went. Messi seemed happy and engaged. He even looked good in Miami’s flamingo-pink kit.
Then Miami missed the playoffs. It turns out that adding a seven-time Ballon d’Or winner midway through the season wasn’t quite enough to turn around what had been one of the worst teams in MLS before Messi’s arrival.
Now Messi’s first campaign in America is limping to a close with one regular season game remaining and Miami’s superstar struggling for fitness. The club’s manager, Gerardo Martino, has already said that he viewed the club’s dead rubbers as preparation for next year.
But the question, just three months after Messi arrived with such fanfare, is how the biggest star in American soccer history would spend his offseason.
“We have to be very precise over the next few months about how we will approach next season,” Martino said.
The trouble is that Martino will have to cook up that approach without seeing Messi for weeks on end. Despite persistent rumors that Barcelona, the club that turned him into a world-beater, would move to bring Messi back for a short spell on loan, Messi said that his plan was to spend time in Argentina before returning to the U.S. for the second season of his 2.5-year contract.
“In January I will return to do preseason again,” he told Argentina television this week. “Start from scratch and prepare as best as possible as always.”
What’s certain is that no one around Messi’s American experiment had expected his season to peter out quite like this. Eighteen of the 29 MLS clubs will progress into the postseason and Miami isn’t one of them. The club’s meager tally of five wins in its first 22 matches doomed the campaign before Messi even arrived for work.
And yet, for a while after his unveiling, the Messi in America script seemed perfect. Alongside his former Barcelona teammates Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets, Messi had Inter Miami humming against vastly inferior defenses. That trio, with its combined age of 105, linked up just as they always did in their primes.
“It’s just instinct to them—they don’t even have to think where the [others] are going to be, where they want the ball,” said Miami defender Kamal Miller, who played behind them. “It’s like they’ve been practicing it every day for their whole lives.”
That’s because they basically had. Before they spent a decade together as Barcelona starters, Messi, Alba, and Busquets were all educated at the club’s youth academy, where players are drilled in Barça’s special brand of soccer from the time they are pre-teens. They learn to look for short passes early, often, and then some more, weaving intricate patterns to keep opponents off balance.
For most of Miami’s players, who honed their soccer far from Catalonia in places such as Syracuse and Central Finland, this new standard took some getting used to. Passes went astray and dribbles ran into traffic. Martino knew that it would always be a lot to ask of his squad to adapt to Messi and Co.’s standards midseason.
But the miracle was that they managed it—at least for a little while.
Freshly stocked with Champions League and World Cup winners, Miami romped through a relatively new tournament with no consequence on the MLS standings called the Leagues Cup.
The team’s Argentine superstar scored in all seven matches. This was just the form Miami wanted him in when it came time to claw back up the table into playoff contention.
That’s when Messi’s 36-year-old legs let him down. Since his first MLS match on Aug. 26, he has played just 283 minutes and made three starts. Despite chants of “We want Messi” everywhere Miami played, Martino knew he needed to be careful trotting out his club’s prized asset.
“The truth is that I saw him lacking match fitness,” Martino said this month. “It is logical because in recent times he has played very little and it could happen that he is lacking rhythm.”
Whether a winter of quiet preparation for next year is now enough to hold Messi’s interest—and restore his physical standards—remains to be seen. Had he reconnected with Barcelona for a spell of high-level competition, he would hardly have been the first MLS star to hop back for a stint in a major European league.
Thierry Henry spent one offseason away from the New York Red Bulls on a seven-game valedictory return to Arsenal, the club where he’d been such a hero that there was already a statue of him outside the stadium.
Ireland striker Robbie Keane also spent a winter at Aston Villa during his time with the Los Angeles Galaxy. And David Beckham, also of the Galaxy, managed to negotiate two offseason stints at AC Milan—he enjoyed the move so much that he tried unsuccessfully to stay in Italy on a permanent basis.
The one team Messi is certain to play for with undying enthusiasm over the coming months is his national squad. Lifting the World Cup for Argentina in Qatar last winter appeared at the time to be the perfect swansong. Only then, Messi decided he quite enjoyed the feeling of being a world champion and chose to stick around a while longer.
This past week, he traveled to South America for a pair of Argentina World Cup qualifying matches, where he was once again surrounded by a team built for him (and scored twice on Tuesday night in a 2-0 victory against Peru). The difference is that Argentina has had Messi’s entire career to tailor a squad to the needs of its No. 10. Miami is still figuring that out.
“Our identity is just to dominate the game as much as we can,” Miller said. “Keep the ball in the opponent’s half as long as we can, get the ball to our 10, and attack from there.” Miami just needs to make sure that its 10 is on the field.
