Lionel Messi is putting together the greatest individual season in MLS history - this is how (2024)

If there were any doubts that Lionel Messi came to MLS to play, they vanished in the first game of this season when he made a fully grown man disappear.

The play was one of those slapstick transitions that American soccer has elevated to some kind of Dadaist art form. A Real Salt Lake defender collapsed in a heap for no clear reason and the goalkeeper was caught scrambling as the ball fell to Messi, who beat a man by cutting backwards at an implausible angle.

The only obstacle standing — well, lying — between him and goal was the crumpled defender, Andrew Brody, who was still writhing in pain at the edge of the penalty area.

There had been no whistle. Play on. Instead of acknowledging the fallen opponent, Messi produced one of the most hilariously disrespectful moments of his career: he flipped the ball over his body with one gloriously weighted touch, skipped around him and collected it in stride to rifle a shot at goal.

“For those asking,” Brody posted later as the footage went viral, “yes, I was the cone on the ground there.”

Messi really chipped a player who was down injured 💀 pic.twitter.com/BN3fpsDjxy

— B/R Football (@brfootball) February 22, 2024

Even Messi’s Inter Miami teammates couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, he just chipped the guy at full speed and got a shot off,’” says midfielder Julian Gressel, who was standing a few yards away. “That would have been the goal of the season for me — probably the best goal I would have ever seen in my life if that had gone in.”

This is what happens when the greatest player ever to kick a ball takes his talents to South Beach. At 36, Messi could skip training to sip yerba mate under an umbrella and fans would still flock to see him play for Inter Miami. Instead, like late-career LeBron James or Tom Brady, he’s stubbornly adding to his legacy long after anyone else’s body would have given up.

A few months after winning his eighth Ballon d’Or, Messi continues to evolve his game in interesting ways. He’ll be back in the global spotlight this summer when he joins Argentina for the Copa America, but even against the likes of Sporting Kansas City and the New England Revolution, every minute of football he has left in him is giddy, unmissable fun.

Oh, and along the way, Messi just might be putting together the greatest season in MLS history.

To anyone who watched Barcelona in the last decade, Inter Miami’s team sheet can look uncannily familiar. In front of Messi, his old strike partner Luis Suarez is still scoring goals at a frightening clip. Behind them, defensive midfielder Sergio Busquets arranges the game with leisurely precision. Jordi Alba can’t bomb forward from left-back like he used to but he remains Messi’s favorite target in the final third. Even the manager, Tata Martino, coached most of these guys at Barcelona in the 2013-14 season.

But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Instead of a bunch of La Masia-trained wizardlings, Inter Miami has surrounded their aging stars with a platoon of young, athletic prospects from South America. The result is a looser, more end-to-end team than any Messi has ever played his club football with.

For most of his career, Messi rarely needed to get involved until his team had tiki-taka-ed its way past the halfway line. He could stroll around the attack like an officer conducting an inspection, watching how defenders moved and calculating where to appear on the ball at exactly the right moment to finish a move.

In Miami’s less finely tuned build-up, he’s getting involved earlier than ever before. Instead of receiving on the wing to dribble across the face of the defense, he’ll often wave Gressel, who plays right midfield, up to the front line and drop alongside Busquets to work the ball out of the back with short passes.

Unlike at PSG, where he could launch intercontinental through-balls to Kylian Mbappe, or with Argentina, where guys like Julian Alvarez and Lautaro Martinez run the channels ahead of him, Messi does less shotgun quarterbacking for Miami. Instead of looking long from the middle third, he’ll weave through the lines with quick one-twos that skip around defenders without risking tackles and fouls.

“He likes to do that, where he picks up speed through a wall pass,” Gressel explains. “I become like a bouncer, in a sense. It’s about getting him into space on the half-turn and moving forward.”

Once he gets rolling between the lines, Messi’s eye for passing lanes is as deadly as ever. He’s averaging more than one through-ball per 90 minutes played. His 10 assists — 12 if you count secondary assists, as MLS does — lead the league. Five of them came in a single half last weekend, when he shredded the New York Red Bulls like a bored house cat.

The best of the bunch, an assist to Paraguayan midfielder Matias Rojas, was a perfect souvenir of Messi in his Miami era. He picked up the ball on the left side of the halfway line, miles from danger. He turned back toward midfield, but instead of circulating the ball to Busquets he changed his mind and bounced an unexpected one-two off of Rojas. Just like that, he was suddenly dribbling downhill at an exposed defense.

Rojas knew what to do after playing the return pass. As opponents collapsed on Messi, his teammate just kept sprinting for goal. Messi turned to his left and then sliced a through ball back to his right at an angle only he could have seen — almost exactly the same angle as his assist to Nahuel Molina against the Netherlands at the last World Cup.

The entire move from the center stripe to goal, through seven opponents, took just three passes between two players.

This is the final evolution of Messi: not a false nine or a dribbling winger but a relentless ball progressor through the heart of the pitch. Over and over again, he finds a way to shake loose and receive the ball in midfield, dribble through the lines and unload a killer pass toward the left side of the box. Only five MLS players — including Toronto FC’s Federico Bernardeschi, Orlando City’s Luis Muriel and Messi’s old Barcelona team-mate Riqui Puig with LA Galaxy — are currently averaging more than Messi’s 19.2 progressive actions per 90 minutes played.

But of course even that undersells the impact of a guy who is also the league’s leading scorer. Messi’s 10 goals in eight appearances this season put him at 1.33 goals per 90 minutes played, his best pace since the record-obliterating days of 2012-13. Instead of settling for increasingly long shots through packed defenses like at latter-day Barcelona, he’s breaking into the penalty area and averaging a healthy 0.15 non-penalty expected goals per shot. Maybe he could get used to these underpaid MLS defenses.

The single most useful number to sum up Messi’s torrid pace in MLS isn’t goals or assists (which he’s leading) or even non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per 90 minutes (yup, leading that too) but a more holistic goal probability model by American Soccer Analysis called goals added. Every time a player touches the ball, goals added measures his team’s chances of scoring or conceding before and after the action and credits him with the difference, summing up all of his on-ball contributions in terms of expected goal difference.

Messi has played just 1,165 minutes in MLS, so this comparison is a little premature, but so far he’s blowing MLS’s career goals added leaders out of the water. These are very good players by any standard —maybe you’ve heard of a couple dudes named Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thierry Henry — and they’ve all played in Europe’s top leagues, but none of them can hold a candle to a 36-year-old Messi.

The greatest individual season in MLS history belongs to Carlos Vela in 2019. Bob Bradley, his manager at Los Angeles FC, told Vela he wanted him to “be as good as Messi,” and the winger appeared to have taken him literally. He set league records for goals in a season (34) and goals plus MLS assists (49). His 1.06 non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per 90 minutes are the best figure on record by a healthy margin, as are his 0.37 goals added per 90 minutes over the average player at his position.

Pick whatever number you want, and prime Carlos Vela’s 2019 is the gold standard. It felt as close as we would ever come to seeing what Messi might do to MLS — until the man himself showed up.

A third of the way through this season, Messi is on pace to break every single one of those records. It’s a complete demolition, an attacking tour de force. He’s retiring the league instead of the other way around.

Inter Miami’s team of Barcelona legends probably won’t go down as the greatest in MLS history — they’re too shaky in the build-up and porous at the back — but for now they’re top of the league and appointment viewing every time Messi steps on the pitch.Maybe that’s the best measure of an all-time great: you just can’t take your eyes off him, even to the end.

(Top photo: Doug Murray/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

John Muller is a Senior Football Writer for The Athletic. He writes about nerd stuff and calls the sport soccer, but hey, nobody's perfect. Follow him at johnspacemuller.substack.com.