The Philly Soccer Page

Photo courtesy MLS Communications / USA Today Sports — Sam Navarro

Lionel Messi plays his first MLS match tomorrow night.

But you already knew that. Or, if you read the first 9 articles in MLSsoccer.com any day in July you did. The icon has been a feature there since long before his announcement this week.

It’s a win-win for the league in a lot of ways.

It’s also a lose-lose.

The win-win scenario

Messi means eyeballs.

Like Beckham before him, or Henri, Gerrard, Lampard, and Silva (The Ringer has a great summary of former MLS global names), the curious soccer mind will want to watch.

At least a little bit for a little while, right?

That’s a win – and making those eyeballs paying ones via Apple TV+ means revenue. That’s a win too.

For as much curiosity the world had when Zlatan Ibrahimovic took the Carson, CA field with LA Galaxy, Messi is a different beast. More successful than any predecessors before him and more universally well-liked, he should move the meter to a level in this country perhaps not seen since Pelé. Heck, tickets are purportedly going for six-figures for tonight’s match – an “in the room when it happened” moment like few others.

Whether Inter Miami wins games or not, it’s a win for the league.

Or is it?

The lose-lose scenario

Maybe the Herons do win games.

The cellar dwellers would need a heck of a run to reach the playoffs, but it’s not out of the question. With the likes of Messi (and his old pals Sergio Busqets and Jordi Alba, each of whom would be a coup in their own right but have become footnotes in Messi’s shadow), not to mention the other players rumored to be en route, who would bet against it happening?

That’s a lose for the league, unfortunately.

For all the progress the nearly three decade old competition has made, a retirement team of late thirty-somethings coming and running roughshod on a last place team is a bad look – more than that, it reinforces every stereotype the league has been trying to shed.

If Miami loses every match though, that’s a lose too.

Maybe the chemistry never clicks, the goals never come, age creeps in (on turf, on another 4-hour flight, etc…), or injuries mount. That’s the obvious scenario, and would make a lot of those curious eyeballs OK with cancelling their subscriptions after a few months.

Here’s the worse one: MLS proves to actually be difficult.

Just like every foreign player has ever said, just like Wayne Rooney reiterated last week, just like Gabriel Heinze found out while being swept out of Concacaf and then out of town, just like MLS IS, the league is a slog. What if the Monstars can’t hack it, can’t steal points in St. Paul, MN on a cold Wednesday, find themselves on a team that just simply gets outplayed?

Not a single person in the world would ever give the league credit, that’s why.

The excuses would pour in, forgiving the stars for every error because of who they were before they came and the nobodys lining up around them. Smart coaching to neutralize the attack? Messi didn’t care in that game, that’s why, or the tactics were cowardly as Heinze said. Great individual performances to keep names off the stat sheet? An anomaly, that’s why. And so on, and so on,…

This is what will happen because this is what happened already.

As Zlatan scored in buckets against MLS’s turnstile defenses, the memes wrote themselves. Then, when he went to Milan immediately after and did the same thing, he was a savant against a league that so prides itself on tactics, defending, and honor. It was less than two months between scoring against LAFC and Cagliari, but the player’s Italian Wikipedia page labels the sudden transfer, for example as, “The return to the high levels.”

Lose-lose.

Summary

Messi is must-watch TV.

To be fair, he has been since he was a teenager so nothing has changed. What has changed is his team, and that team is in MLS.

That’s a good thing, even when it’s a bad one.

Chris Gibbons is the captain of noted PSP feeder club West Philly FC, and the co-host of the All3Points podcast (@all3points). He writes columns and match analyses in addition to his editing duties, and his pieces are often full of Douglas Adams quotes or the kind of music that shows his nearly middle age.