Lionel Messi is out of the Major League Soccer playoffs after Inter Miami, the No 1 seed in the Eastern Conference, suffered a stunning opening-round loss to ninth-seeded Atlanta United.
It is a disaster for MLS and the league’s media partner, Apple. The most popular athlete on the planet is out of the playoffs after just one round, before even the quarterfinals.
Perhaps, though, it is also a blessing in disguise.
From the moment Messi announced in summer 2023 that he was coming to MLS, the league has had dueling directives. The first was to maximize the moment and leverage Messi’s presence to bring new fans to the product. But the second job was more important: build on that initial pop and keep as many fans as possible around when the now 37-year-old is gone.
Even optimistically, it’s tough to envision Messi playing more than two more seasons in Miami’s pink jersey — and the remainder of these playoffs will now be a test of whether MLS is succeeding on that second front.
Inter Miami are undoubtedly maximizing their Messi moment, or at least doing everything in their power to do so. They have squeezed every dollar out of the salary budget to build a team around him. They circumnavigated the globe in preseason, bringing in millions in profit, to grow their brand. They have announced some of the biggest sponsorship deals in MLS history. They’ve also won two trophies in two seasons: the 2023 Leagues Cup and the 2024 Supporters’ Shield, the latter by setting a record for most points earned in an MLS regular season.
On-field success is never guaranteed, as the result of that best-of-three series against Atlanta shows, but Miami are doing everything they can to try to win — and to grow their fanbase, both locally and globally.
(Nathan Ray Seebeck/Imagn Images)
The league, meanwhile, has benefited from Messi’s presence, too.
MLS has set records this year in total attendance, average attendance, season-ticket sales, sold-out games and the number of matches with crowds of over 40,000 — numbers boosted not just by Messi’s presence, but also by having more teams in the league than ever before. MLS also boasted about increases in sponsorship revenues, record retail sales (driven by people buying Messi’s jersey, which ranked No. 1 globally for all Adidas football/soccer shirts) and record social and digital media audiences.
Apple, which also partnered with Messi as part of his contract to come to MLS, has seen benefits, too. Last season, which the Argentine arrived halfway through, Inter Miami owner Jorge Mas tweeted that subscribers to MLS Season Pass on Apple TV had doubled in the first month of Messi in MLS, with the Spanish-language audience growing more than 50 percent.
The Messi Effect is real! 🐐 Subscribers to #MLSSeasonPass on @AppleTV have more than doubled since Messi joined @InterMiamiCF. Also, Spanish language viewership on #MLSSeasonPass on @AppleTV has surpassed over 50% for Messi matches and continues to rise. How exciting for a truly…
— Jorge Mas (@Jorge__Mas) August 10, 2023
The fear is that those numbers might be a commercial blip. If MLS has a plan on how to fully leverage those audiences, we haven’t seen it yet.
Just days after Messi was officially unveiled as a Miami player, Mas delivered a line that spoke to the optimism over the transformation he might bring. “Evolution is inevitable,” Mas said. “And change is likely.”
It has been nearly a year and a half since that moment, and MLS’s ideas on how to evolve aren’t yet clear. The league is discussing changes, including potentially flipping to a fall-spring calendar from the current February-December one but there has been little hint as to how it intends to grow the on-field product.
Last year, FC Dallas owner Clark Hunt told The Athletic that MLS was “studying” the Messi effect to “understand how that’s going to impact the league long-term, how it’s going to grow not only our fanbase in the stadiums each weekend, but also how it’s going to grow our media subscriptions through Apple”. The league was having “substantive conversations about the way we can move the league forward,” he said.
Those conversations are still ongoing.
Meanwhile, it feels like the bounce from Messi’s arrival has worn off, beyond the sold-out stadiums around the nation when Miami and company are in town. Whereas every Messi highlight was on SportsCenter in his first months in MLS, his impact in the 2024 season, no less fantastic on the field, has felt less mainstream. Messi’s jerseys are everywhere, but MLS as a product is far less ubiquitous.
(Peter Joneleit/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
MLS and Apple have not shared viewership or subscriber numbers. (Apple also does not share numbers for its MLB broadcasts.) It is therefore impossible to know whether Messi’s impact on subscribers has continued to grow, remained stable or fallen. Or whether Messi’s presence in the league has meant an uptick in viewership for games that don’t involve Inter Miami.
That last part is crucial.
This season’s MLS playoffs, now down to eight surviving teams, include four from the two biggest media markets in the country in New York and Los Angeles. Also represented are Atlanta, where MLS arguably resonates the most locally, and Seattle, where it traditionally has mattered in a big way. The final two, Minnesota and Orlando, are the league’s small-market success stories.
In many ways, Messi’s absence aside, this playoff field now sets up exceptionally well for MLS to showcase its product.
But will MLS resonate without Messi? Will people actually tune in to the remainder of the playoffs?
Historically, the answer has been no. At least not in a way that compares to other major American sports leagues. Or even to the very best soccer numbers for Mexico’s Liga MX, the Premier League in England and the Europe-wide UEFA Champions League. MLS has its loyal fanbase, but that level of viewership needs to grow substantially.
The 2024 postseason now will serve as a reminder of what MLS’s reality looks like without Messi. When the viewership data rolls in, will those with access to the numbers behind the scenes truly evaluate what they mean for the league’s future and the best path forward? Will it accelerate change?
The league will be behind a paywall on Apple through 2032. MLS has to entice fans not just to watch its product, but to pay to do so. Bringing the world’s most popular player to its league was certainly one way to get them to do that. Figuring out how to keep those fans, and to get more to sign up, has always been the harder task.
GO DEEPER
Where did Miami go wrong and what does playoff exit mean for Messi and Martino?
“I wouldn’t say that the timing is when Lionel Messi leaves MLS, it’s really about what do we want to be by 2027,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said last year in his state-of-the-league address. “We’re going to have the eyes of the world on us (for the 2026 World Cup, when the majority of games will be played in the U.S. as it co-hosts with Canada and Mexico), and the soccer market here in the United States is going to be exposed to the entire global soccer and football community.
“What is the product that we deliver?”
The final two weeks of these playoffs — and Messi’s absence from them — is a crucial opportunity to evaluate exactly that.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
