Major League Soccer (MLS) has been in existence since 1996, but the bug didn't hit me until 2017, when Minnesota United started play as an expansion team. Since then I have followed the league and Minnesota casually, but of course I took notice when Lionel Messi joined Inter Miami in 2023. This is a great book on how his arrival has impacted the league.
Title/Author:
“The Messi
Effect: How the Global Legend Changed the Future of American Soccer” by Paul
Tenorio
Rating:
5 of 5 stars (excellent)
Review:
When a global
superstar in soccer decides to play for a team in the United States, it makes
for a seismic reaction from soccer fans across the world and provides American
soccer a lot of publicity. Three
examples of this are when Pele arrived to play for the New York Cosmos in 1975,
David Beckham arriving from England to play for the LA Galaxy in 2007 and
Lionel Messi’s signing with Inter Miami in 2023. The latter of these events is covered in this
book by Paul Tenorio.
It should be
noted that this book’s primary focus is not Messi himself but the business of
Major League Soccer (MLS), the highest level of professional soccer in the
United States. The “Messi Effect” is how
his presence in MLS would affect the growth, quality of play, popularity and
progression of MLS. The league has taken slow but mostly steady growth since its
near bankruptcy in 2001. There was a
noted increase in many of these items when Beckham joined, a fact Tenorio notes
often.
However, the
connection between the two superstars of different eras is much tighter than
that. After his playing days were over,
Beckham became one of the owners of the Inter Miami expansion team, thereby
becoming Messi’s employer. Why Messi
decided to join Inter Miami is told in excellent detail early in the book by
Tenorio and he does just as fine a job with his explanations of the inner
workings of MLS ownership.
Tenorio notes
how the principal owner of Inter Miami, Jorge Mas, is a visionary and forward
thinker as Mas wants the league to use the power of Messi’s popularity to grow
the league’s international status. As a
whole, ownership of MLS has always had a conservative view of growth and favored
competitive balance, a formula what was working for the NFL. Tenorio paints a terrific picture of these
owners and how their actions were holding back the size of growth for the
league. There are changes coming that he
points out, but they may be too late to complement the exposure the league is
getting from Messi and the 2026 World Cup coming to North America.
I bring all
these up because this is a fantastic look at not only Messi’s arrival and on-field
performance but MLS as a whole – from its beginnings to its upcoming changes on
the schedule and rosters. Any fan of MLS
or soccer in general will want to add this one to their library.
I wish to thank
St. Martin’s Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley. The opinions
expressed in this review are strictly my own.