Messi Can’t Keep Saving The Leagues Cup Forever

Lionel Messi, left, celebrates with David Ruiz celebrate following the Leagues Cup Semifinal between Inter Miami CF and Orlando City at Chase Stadium on Wednesday.

MLS via Getty Images

For the second time in three years, the organizers of the Leagues Cup have been blessed with an ideal final in terms of drawing media attention based entirely on the presence of one player.

Lionel Messi’s most memorable string of performances with Inter Miami might still be his first seven games with the Herons, when he scored an astounding 10 goals to lead the club to its first Leagues Cup crown in 2023. That included scoring the opening goal in the final, a match that finished as a 1-1 draw before a sellout crowd of 30,109 in Nashville.

Now, after scoring twice and adding an assist in the final 15 minutes of Miami’s 3-1 semifinal victory over Orlando City on Wednesday night, he’s set to play in a 2025 final on Sunday night at the Seattle Sounders that could set all sorts of new records in terms of commercial metrics.

The Perfect Setup

Seattle has been among the league’s most successful markets on and off the field since joining MLS in 2009, regularly ranking near the top in league average attendance from Day 1 and and winning seven major trophies. With the last of those, Seattle became the only modern-era Concacaf club champions, winning the the 2022 Concacaf Champions League and temporarily halting Liga MX dominance in the event.

The result of a club with that pedigree hosting Messi’s Miami is the expectation that tomorrow’s crowd will significantly exceed the tournament record single-match attendance of 50,675 and possibly even sell out the entire upper level of Lumen Field, an NFL venue which typically sees only the lower level opened for Sounders matches.

It should also result in a big viewership number, with the match available over the air (in Spanish) in markets with local Univision affiliates, on most cable services via Univision/TUDN, and also on Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass service.

Papering Over Problems

The danger, however, is that MLS and Liga MX – who together operate the event – look at the presumed commercial success of Sunday’s final and don’t continue to consider fixes need to solve the three-year-old tournament’s two very obvious problems:

1. The format remains fundamentally unfair to Liga MX teams
2. The late-summer timing results in tournament fatigue

In Year 3 of the event, MLS and Liga MX tried to engineer a new format that would be fairer to Mexican clubs through the first stage of play, with Mexican teams only competing against each other in the standings that would guarantee advancement to the knockout phase.

That guaranteed four Mexican sides among the eight quarterfinalists, pitted directly against four MLS foes. But it also guaranteed there would be a chance of the result that followed: A second consecutive semifinal round featuring only MLS teams, in a tournament designed explicitly to capitalize on the natural rivalry between the two leagues and the popularity of Liga MX on American soil.

And playing the quarterfinals in midweek, 10 days after the competing Mexican sides had returned home, probably created a more acute away disadvantage in those quarterfinal games than in early phase play. We see that quite often in Concacaf play, where the home-field advantage typically works out to be greater than in MLS or Liga MX league fixtures.

Continued Tweaks Are Likely

The latter problem may eventually solve itself if MLS eventually switches – as many expect – to a fall-to-spring schedule. That would free the leagues to contest the entire tournament in a more standard midweek continental format over several months, rather than asking viewers to digest 54 opening phase tournament games over 10 days.

The problem with the latter approach is the late-July timing directly follows other more prestigious international tournaments. This year it was the Concacaf Gold Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup. Next year it would be the World Cup. It’s impossible to imagine even the most fanatic soccer fans don’t have some viewer fatigue in the weeks immediately following, when Leagues Cup has been played.

Another option is switching the tournament to a December/January event played exclusively in warm-weather MLS (and hopefully Liga MX) venues. That would help MLS bridge some of the coldest months in a fall-to-spring format.

The good news is the previous format change indicates continued awareness of problems that won’t go away once Messi’s playing career is finished.

In a vacuum, maybe those issues wouldn’t even be that important. But as an event that serves as a qualifier for the Concacaf Champions Cup, it’s hard to rectify the MLS dominance of Leagues Cup with Mexican teams’ dominance of Concacaf competition, which has been played as a true home-and-home event for more than two decades. And underwhelming Leagues Cup attendances – which average several thousand lower than MLS and Liga MX averages – also reinforce the need for tweaks.