Lionel Messi just had the best season in MLS history. Does anyone care? | MLS

OK, show of hands. How many of you knew that Lionel Messi – a global superstar who did determined to spend the next three years in the United States – just finished the best individual season in Major League Soccer history?

Be honest.

Most people will be vaguely surprised by this news. You are aware that the greatest footballer of all time is wrapping up his career in North America, playing for whoever has those pink kits that are spread across the planet like a beautiful poisonous slime mold. Context-free highlights drift past the periphery of your consciousness, floating on the algorithm, and you heard a rumor that the kids have started calling Messi ‘braceman’ because he scores two goals every game. Which of course he does. He is Messi.

Even among MLS diehards, Messi’s campaign seems strangely underrated. He won the Golden Boot and tied for most assists despite missing a quarter of the season, and set new records for non-penalty goals and goal contributions along the way. According to the advanced experts at American Soccer Analysis goals added In other words, he added twice as much value to the average player as second-place Denis Bouanga, leaving Carlos Vela’s 2019, the previous best-ever MLS campaign, in the dust. Despite all this, there was still talk around the league last month 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 tears up MLS – does anyone actually do that? give me a face?

Supporters of opponents have reasons not to do that. 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 a dutiful acknowledgment of his greatness and a creeping resentment over his intrusion into a niche fandom. Same league as that canceled a fan favorite podcast And writers replaced by AI can still find enough 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 a team spent more than double the average wage bill to put together a Barcelona Legends tour.

There’s also plenty of evidence that the average American sports fan doesn’t use Messi as much as a gateway to MLS. League executives ever predicted that Messi mania and next year’s World Cup would “double our fanbase by 2026, then we will double it and double it again.” Instead, average regular season attendance is down 5.5% year over year, while MLS continues to losing ground to the European competitions in the prime of American football. On Thursday, the MLS boasted that total weekly viewership for all matches was 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 Because in the United States, Messi still trails Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays in Saudi Arabia, and spent the summer trailing WNBA player Caitlin Clark, who has broken into the national sports conversation in a way that the 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 the headlines. No, they don’t seem to have been converted into avid MLS enthusiasts. League commissioner Don Garber offered a few ambiguous figures earlier this year to support the claim that viewership is “up almost 50% compared to last year.” 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 playoff matches will be made free for all Apple TV subscriberswhich indicates that this model is not yet fully working.

If there was any hope that the whole “Lionel Messi, Florida man” thing would become a broader cultural phenomenon, there isn’t much to show for it yet. Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham brought football into the entertainment mainstream, with 418,000 and 24,000 reviews respectively on IMDb. Apple’s glossy docuseries Messi Meets America has that 458 reviews. No, there is no missing comma.

The problem is that there isn’t really a story here. Messi does assumed to dominate MLS. If he succeeds, it will be because he is playing in what the world, however unfairly, still considers a “retirement league.” If he and his friends from Barcelona sometimes struggle – Inter Miami only finished third in the Eastern Conference this year – what do you expect? They are practically retired. There is no story that appeals to the imagination, only a weekly clip show alien targets that seem to exist outside of any real competitive context, even for fans of the league.

Maybe the MLS play-offs can give this experiment some strength. America loves a knockout tournament, and the closest Messi has come to conquering the world’s biggest sporting market is those magical first few weeks in which Inter Miami won a largely meaningless Leagues Cup in 2023. Or maybe he turns back the clock at next summer’s World Cup and reminds people that every minute he has left on the pitch is still watching TV.

It seems more likely at this point, even after his extension, that Messi’s stay in Miami will go down in history as a half-forgotten footnote to a storied career, leaving MLS with a handful of new records but no real transformative change.