Snagging Messi is fix Beckham needs for Inter Miami
Forgive David Beckham that his Inter Miami soccer club and its home game Saturday might not be all on his mind this weekend. His and wife Victoria’s eldest son, Brooklyn, is getting married that day in nuptials costing $4 million at the 44,000square-foot Palm Beach mansion owned by bride Nicola’s father, billionaire financier Nelson Peltz.
Who would have believed the worldly Beckhams, worth an estimated $450 million, would be marrying up? Yes, there is a prenup. (Peltz also owns a 27bedroom shack outside of New York. It has an ice hockey rink, a private lake and a flock of rare albino peacocks.)
This is the company Beckham keeps.
The family has spent the past few days on his $6.5 million superyacht off Miami Beach. They vacation across Europe with the pop legend his four children call Uncle Elton.
If you Google “charmed life,” Beckham’s picture should appear. Midas’ touch has not been better than that of the only Englishman to score a goal in three separate World Cups. A man with 72 million Instagram followers and 56 million on Facebook.
Beckham is soccer’s global ambassador, a palette of tattoos and GQ handsome and leading a goldgilded, paparazzi-chronicled life. If he could act, he would be Bond. His is a meticulously cultivated and maintained international brand alongside wife Victoria, herself an icon and the former “Posh” in the
Spice Girls.
Power couples don’t get much bigger.
Inspect all Beckham has ever involved himself in and you cannot find failure.
Except now. In Miami. Inter Miami has been a losing proposition, a disappointment, into its third season in Major League Soccer, the premier U.S. league in the world’s biggest sport.
Don’t get it wrong. That
Miami has an MLS team at all is a triumph of will and perseverance for Beckham and took years to accomplish. But the franchise born into a pandemic has otherwise almost seemed cursed.
Says local soccer legend Ray Hudson, now on Inter Miami’s broadcast team: “This club doesn’t need a coach, it needs an exorcist.”
Beckham failed to get the waterfront stadium he envisioned and now he and principal owner Jorge Mas struggle to see liftoff for the ambitious Miami Freedom Park project at the Melreese golf site near the Miami airport. The Miami City Commission is to vote April 28 whether to finally green-light it … unless there is yet another delay.
And the product on the field has been a major letdown; booing has begun to be heard at the team’s temporary but now three-years-and-counting home stadium in Fort Lauderdale.
Inter Miami in its brief history had played 63
MLS games entering Saturday, winning 19, tying nine and losing 35. The Herons, as they are unofficially nicknamed, had scored 64 goals and allowed 104. Compounding all that, MLS fined Inter Miami $2 million for roster violations over the acquisition of Blaise Matuidi under a previous coach and personnel chief.
Beckham and Mas grow impatient for a cure, and a rebooting of Inter Miami as a top-tier brand, a league flagship, a destination for international stars.
Enter Lionel Messi.
Again.
Speculation from abroad will not end. If you subscribe to wherethere’s-smoke-there’sfire, the smoke is impossible to miss, and it smells like perfume, like hope.
That Inter Miami needs a savior and Messi is the best one realistically available is beyond doubt.
Hudson calls the state of the franchise “bewildering,” and likens Messi’s arrival to “Shakespeare showing up a the local library. It’s staggering. It would be the biggest import of any athletic talent in any any sport anywhere. And yet we know the ambition of this ownership group.
You know how there is no actual bitcoin to hold in your hand and yet cryptocurrency is real? There is no certainty Messi is coming to Miami, you cannot hold it in your hand, and yet the possibility is currency.
It is the best and only currency Beckham has right now to buy the ebbing faith, trust and patience of fans.
Maybe Messi, someday.
The latest speculation is that, since leaving his Barcelona club home last summer for Paris-Saint Germain, Messi has not found PSG (just ousted in the Champions League) a great fit and may be plotting an exit as early as this summer or just after the late-year World Cup in Qatar, where Messi will lead the Argentinian side.
Messi has said he is intrigued about ending his career in America. He owns a $9.4 million oceanfront home off Miami Beach. He and Beckham have a longstanding relationship. Mas says if Messi leaves PSG, “We’d love to see [him] here” and may be “willing to do anything.” That might include bringing in top players to augment Messi, because, on the current team, he’d be the Hope diamond amid a litter of cubic zirconia.
Leo is 34 now. The seven-time Ballon d’Or winner, though still really good, might be beyond his best days. No matter. Messi joining Inter Miami would be as big as LeBron James “taking [his] talents to South Beach” and joining the Miami Heat in 2010. Internationally, it would be bigger.
Inter Miami has had fairly big signings, such as Matuidi, Gonzalo Higuain and DeAndre Yedlin, but Messi is a stratosphere all his own.
“Messi comes from a planet that has a population of three,” says Hudson. “Him, Pele and Maradona.”
Last summer, after leading Argentina to a 1-0 Copa America win over Brazil, Messi and family attempted to dine quietly at the Italian restaurant Cafe Ragazzi in Surfside. It went viral on social media. Dozens of fans began gathering outside. When he left a mob of hundreds waited for a glimpse of futbol deity.
That was an iota of the mania Messi playing for Miami would inspire. Local stores could not order enough of his jerseys to keep them in stock.
The growing impatience of Mas and Beckham is understandable.
Mas, a newly minted billionaire because he knows business and marketplace, looks around and sees the Heat and Panthers winning big, the Dolphins and Marlins much improved and
Canes football headed right. And sees his club lagging.
Beckham, if you didn’t know, deals with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Victoria has said everything for him must be in a straight line or pairs, including the order inside the fridge at home.
“Everything is symmetrical,” she said. “If there’s three [drink] cans, he’ll throw one away because it has to be an even number.”
One can only imagine how such a desire for order and control might lead a man accustomed to only success to be driven to solve Inter Miami.
Landing Lionel Messi is David Beckham’s ace. But now he must play it. Go all in and find a way to win the biggest hand in soccer.
Because if you tease and tease, and dare sow hope this high, you had better deliver.
Greg Cote: 305-376-3492, @gregcote