Another year, another trophy for Lionel Messi.
With two goals in a 3-2 win over the defending MLS Cup champions, Columbus Crew, on Wednesday, Inter Miami’s global superstar secured the MLS’s Supporters’ Shield – awarded each year to the team with the best regular season record.
It’s the 39th club trophy in Messi’s cabinet, so the temptation is to mark it as simply business as usual. It may actually be one of his most unexpected club titles to date.
Most of Messi’s big moments in MLS have been triumphs of validation – including of MLS’s own ambition. The league still isn’t very close to its goal of being one of the world’s elite competitions, but Messi’s signing has brought them closer in concrete ways – his pink Inter Miami jersey is Adidas’ bestseller globally for all of its soccer properties, an unheard-of achievement for a kit with an MLS logo on the sleeve. An increasing number of accomplished players from abroad are signing up to play in the league, and just as importantly, major clubs in Europe and elsewhere are increasingly scouting in MLS to find the next big thing (or at least a bargain buy).
Messi certainly boosted MLS’s unique 10-year media rights partnership with Apple, which puts the vast majority of games in a league that is desperate for exposure behind a hard paywall. What better way to get people to open their wallets than the chance to see the greatest player of all time? His memorable Leagues Cup debut and eventual win in the final lent legitimacy to a nascent competition promoted heavily by MLS and Liga MX even as it further clogs team’s schedules, and has no well-known analogue anywhere else in the world of soccer.
This Supporters’ Shield is different from all of that. It’s an MLS original, born of the league’s inherent weirdness thanks to the efforts of its earliest and most dedicated fans. Messi and Miami didn’t just boost a league property by winning the Shield – they etched their name onto a piece of US soccer culture, and one of MLS’s two longest-running markers of sporting success.
The Shield’s very existence is owed to a grassroots movement that feels a world away from the superstardom occupied by Messi and strived for by the league as a whole. The original trophy was conceived just a few years into the league’s existence by supporters (hence the name), who felt that, in addition to the champion-crowning playoffs and MLS Cup, there should be recognition for the team with the most points at the end of the year, as happens in virtually every other domestic league in the world. The original shield itself was fabricated by a Kansas University art student for a few thousand dollars. It has since been replaced, but has usually been passed between fan organizations rather than club officials. Wednesday was a rare instance in which it was not: Because none of Inter Miami’s supporters’ groups are registered with the Independent Supporters’ Council (ISC), the group that administers the Shield, fans of 2023 winners FC Cincinnati drove to Columbus to hand-deliver it to Inter Miami for their locker room celebration (In theory, Miami fans will hold the Shield once a group joins the ISC).
Despite the unexpected involvement of Messi and all of Miami’s stars, there was no on-field pomp and circumstance when the shield exchange occurred (a clear missed opportunity by the league). A star won’t be added above the Inter Miami crest, and the club won’t be known as 2024’s league champion. In a sense, that’s fair – the size of the league and its unbalanced schedule means that the Shield is not an unassailable measure of how one team stands in comparison to everyone else. But the Shield is still a pretty good indicator of which MLS team was actually the best over the course of the season, and for Miami to win it so soon after Messi’s arrival is a huge achievement.
It may seem like ancient history now, but remember that Miami missed the playoffs last year and were dead last when Messi arrived. Yet they won not just because of Messi, but because a constantly evolving team coalesced quickly and learned to play about as well without their biggest star as they did with him. Messi has missed 15 games this year, mostly due to injury, but still managed to put up an eye-popping 17 goals and 15 assists in his 17 appearances so far, as Miami averaged an impressive 2.12 points per game with the Argentinian. For most teams in MLS history, and certainly most Shield winners, losing such a productive player would be devastating. In Miami, the team did even better (barely), earning 2.13 points per game in the games Messi missed.
That speaks in part to the performances all over the field. Luis Suárez, of course, scored heaps of important goals. Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets elevated the play of those around them through their workrate and intelligence. Smart young additions like Federico Redondo raised the team’s ceiling outside its stars. Stalwarts like Robert Taylor put in workmanlike shifts constantly. The defensive unit and goalkeeper Drake Callender also repeatedly came up in big moments, including on Wednesday, when Callender saved a Cucho Hernández penalty kick that would have tied a game Miami needed to win in order to capture the Shield.
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The Shield win also speaks to the ability of head coach Tata Martino, who in essence was building the plane while teaching his team to fly it … sometimes without its captain. Between the end of the 2023 season and today, Inter Miami have turned over about half of their 30-player active roster. That includes players like Gregore, DeAndre Yedlin and Kamal Miller who had been important parts of the team’s core. Several of those additions, like Redondo, right back Marcelo Weigandt, and midfielder Matías Rojas either arrived midseason or had their introductions interrupted by injury.
Despite proving their worth over the course of a full season, Supporters’ Shield winners are not usually remembered unless they also win MLS Cup – something only four Shield winners in the last 20 years have done. If Inter Miami buck that trend and do the double, the sight of Messi lifting the Philip F Anschutz Trophy, on a podium, surrounded by confetti and joyous teammates at a sold-out Chase Stadium in Fort Lauderdale would be stark enough to overshadow everything else, including the Shield. This is especially true given that it could be Messi’s last act on US shores – his contract expires at the end of this season.
But if Miami make an early playoff exit, winning the Shield will always give Messi and Miami their own unassailable claim to MLS greatness. And the Shield itself, by mere association, could benefit in stature as a result.