Messi-anic Complex
Grayson
Lionel Messi is several games into his American experience, but I’m still pretty confused about what to think about it.
Are fans supposed to approach the rest of this season and next season as competitions between professional soccer teams all vying for trophies? Or are fans supposed to enjoy an extended Messi barnstorming tour, with Messi and his teammates performing ever more impressive feats of brilliance against 28 different versions of the Washington Generals? Should professional players feel entitled to compete as hard and as physically against Messi as they do against other star players in MLS? Or do the refs have a special responsibility to protect Messi, thus increasing his already considerable advantage?
I suspect the answers to all of these questions will become pretty apparent on their own over the next 18 months. But there is one other thing that’s going to continue to nag at me, and I’m not sure we’ll ever really get to the bottom of it.
(No, I’m not going to be talking about roster compliance. I am beyond bored of that, and there is no point to it until MLS releases every team’s ongoing GAM and TAM totals, along with each player’s Salary Budget Charge, and maintains updated and correct rosters on the website.)
The ticket prices for games featuring Inter Miami the rest of the season have been discussed on soccer Twitter (X?) basically every day since his signing was announced. The get-in-the-door price for the U.S. Open Cup semifinal between FC Cincinnati and Inter Miami is nearly $400. Prices for Miami’s recent game in Dallas started north of $800. Presumably, many of the people driving up these prices are not generally MLS fans – they are the people showing up to games in Argentina Messi jerseys, walking out of games the second Messi is subbed out. They are not there to see a game, there are there to see “the GOAT.”
And I don’t really get what motivates them. Seeing Messi play in person is simply not a “once in a lifetime” experience, or even a particularly singular experience. Messi first appeared for Barcelona’s senior team in 2004. In his career, per Transfermarkt, he has appeared in 879 club games and 175 games for the Argentina National Team. That’s more than 1,000 chances to see Messi in person over the last 20 years!
In 2016, for example, Messi played five games in the United States in the Copa America Centenario. Only two of those games were close to sold out – the semifinal against the United States and the final against Chile. Against Bolivia, in Seattle, attendance was nearly 25,000 people under stadium capacity. Per the Seattle Times, the median ticket price for the latter game was $125 and the price to get in was only $60.
What’s more, the vast majority of those 1,000-plus games were of vastly superior quality to the games Messi will be playing now. They were in Copa America, the World Cup, La Liga, Ligue 1, and the Champions League. What makes Messi special is not that he can get a hat trick against FC Dallas, it’s that he can get a hat trick against Real Madrid. And Atletico Madrid. And Sevilla. And Arsenal. And Manchester City. And the Brazilian National Team.
People are paying super-premium prices, and they aren’t even getting pure Messi. They’re getting a heavily stepped on product. So why?
Part of it, I suppose, is morbid curiosity. Can you plop the best player in the world onto the worst team in MLS and make that team an immediate title contender? But, that’s not really what they did, is it? They also signed two more players who were starting regularly last season for Barcelona, signed three more of the most promising young talents in South America, and mixed them into a team that already had one of the best MLS strikers of all time, another young striker signed from Wolves for millions of dollars, the USMNT’s number two right back, and a center back that went with Canada to the World Cup. In fact, every single one of Miami’s starters against Dallas had been called into their national teams within the past 12 months. That is not, as currently constructed, a bad team by any means.
There will also be some, I suspect, who say they want to watch Messi in person so they can study his movement and really appreciate how the best to ever do it approaches the game. Those people are gassing you up. There is plenty of tape on Messi, and if you were interested in writing a dissertation on him you would already have done it. What people who attended Messi’s first game saw, for example, was 90 minutes of a mostly unremarkable game between two mid teams capped by a Messi free kick. There are no secrets to be gleaned from watching Lionel Messi run past the likes of Robin Jansson.
What I think it comes down to for the vast majority of people, and what depresses me a bit, is that they are genuinely fans of Messi and they want to “support” him. This was on display in Miami’s recent game against Philadelphia Union, where cheers could be heard every time Messi touched the ball and after every Miami goal. Surely, none of these people (or very few of them) were Inter Miami fans more than a few weeks ago. They want to see Messi score, and they are as enthusiastic about seeing him score against Philadelphia Union as they would be seeing him score against the St. Xavier High School junior varsity team.
On the one hand, what this means is that MLS is not, by any reasonable definition of the word, a professional soccer league while Messi is playing in it. It is Messi’s version of the Eras Tour, where he goes from city to city playing the hits to rapturous crowds, with each city’s local team acting as glorified stadium vendors.
On the other hand, this reveals a certain kind of fandom that I do not remember existing before the Internet age (at least among those not named John Hinckley, Jr.). Especially among Millennials and Generation Z, a phenomenon has developed called parasociality – a one-sided relationship where a fan develops the illusion of some real, personal connection with a star, artist, or other icon. Due to parasociality, fans celebrate their subjects successes as if they were their own, and fans feel their hero’s setbacks and slights as deeply as if they themselves were suffering. The danger is that fans will cease expecting to have their own successes and experiences, ending up in a place like Annie Wilkes from Misery where the end of her favorite book series is the equivalent to the end of her own life. What used to be a compelling plot for a terrifying horror story is now just how we live.
This development is especially concerning when combined with widespread adult loneliness, where men and women increasingly lack regular, meaningful connections with people in their own lives. People frequently live away from their families, have little social life outside of work, delay starting their own families, and live alone in front of their screens.
Supporting a team is different. Teams are closely identified with communities, fans attend games together, and supporters’ groups develop that allow members to engage in activities together that do, often, blossom into real friendship. Anything, of course, can be taken too far, but communal team support strikes me as less likely to result into an individual retreating into a fixation or allowing another person’s experiences to replace their own.
Late in Season 2 of the show You’re the Worst, the character Gretchen finds herself contemplating a future with her new boyfriend Jimmy and wondering how she can maintain her own identity and avoid falling into ennui as the relationship progresses. She spots a “cool” married couple with a new baby in her neighborhood, and she starts to obsess over them. In them, she sees possibilities – if they have maintained their spark after marriage and a child, then maybe there is something to look forward to for her and Jimmy. But after she orchestrates a meeting with the couple, she finds that they are not as perfect as they seem. The husband, in particular, is regretful and pathetic. She has trouble coping with this revelation because she has lost sight of the fact that her relationship is her own, she has agency over her experiences, and her life is specific to her and what she makes of it. She let the promise of mimicking another’s perceived success to supplant the desire to have her own identity.
When fans valorize an individual player’s brilliance over competition, they fall into the same trap. And Messi in MLS is worse than other top players in top leagues, because his experience is going to be absent of any meaningful adversity. It will be even easier for fans to get sucked in – just like Swifties, following their idol through success after uninterrupted success.
MLS has not helped here. Since Messi arrived, the coverage has been euphoric. Not one second has been spent wondering if it is, in fact, good for the league for all competition to be removed. Fans voicing any reservations have been told they should be happy to see Messi, devaluing entirely the natural desire to see one’s own team succeed and to share that success with other supporters in one’s city. The league has sent the message that it does not care about the community of fans, instead valuing only one man’s solitary greatness.
The overriding mystery to all of this is whether any of these Messi fans will care about MLS when he is gone. They do not, currently, care about MLS as a real competition, and MLS so far has given them no reason to change that. MLS’s choice, then, will be to either allow itself to give up these fans by returning to a league of parity, where multiple teams can compete for various trophies, or to instead crown the next version of Inter Miami (likely in Los Angeles or New York) by bringing in Kylian Mbappe and a few of his teammates, starting a brand new cycle.
If MLS goes the second route, fans of other MLS teams will then have a choice to make. Do they continue following a spectacle showcasing one singular talent after another, denying fans of most teams the experience of any success of their own, or do fans drop the league and turn their energy and attention elsewhere. Ironically, at that point, MLS’s only hope of keeping these supporters’ interest and dollars will be the relationships that the fan communities have forged within themselves, the unique identities that they have fostered.
Unfortunately, this is something that MLS has repeatedly shown it simply does not value.
