Messi Mania takes over L.A. – Daily News

LOS ANGELES – I fathom that someday, I might tell my grandkids I interviewed Yogi Berra. That I was there the night LeBron James broke the NBA’s scoring record. That I got paid to watch Shohei Ohtani pitch and hit.

And, definitely, that I saw Lionel Messi perform live.

Mr. Inevitable. A real-life extraterrestrial. Soccer’s most mind-bending magician.

The player could – and should – lift Major League Soccer to another level. He finished with a pair of assists and a pair of shots in Inter Miami’s 3-1 victory over hosts LAFC on Sunday, his every touch electrifying the record soccer crowd of 22,921 at BMO Stadium.

This was the L.A. stop in the summer of Messi, as the seven-time Ballon d’Or award winner led Inter Miami in front of the standing-room-only crowd at an absolutely amped BMO Stadium, the place blushing Inter Miami pink everywhere except the blacked-out supporters’ section. It was serving a Barbenheimer look.

There are hot tickets and then there’s tickets the temperature of the photosphere of the sun, prices many fans on hand paid to watch Sunday’s regular-season MLS match, key for Messi’s squad in its uphill playoff pursuit.

To see Messi live Sunday, people reportedly laid down as much as $36,000, though fans I talked to said they all paid between $800 and $1,200 per ticket.

“Yes!” Taleen Vargas thought about selling her tickets, but she didn’t think they’d go for enough to make it worth missing Messi live with her LAFC-loving family, including her soccer-playing 13-year-old daughter, Vauna.

“Let’s face it, the man is the GOAT,” Taleen said. “Like Pepe and all those other legends – Messi is the next one. But you gotta bleed black and gold!

“This is insane,” she added then, looking around at the Messi jerseys – Argentina’s blue-and-white stripes, FC Barcelona’s red, blue and maroon, and so much Inter Miami pink – streaming past us.

“It’s gonna be a lot of people here to see him, but it’s people who love the sport, right?”

The Messi Effect is in full effect in America. Since the Argentine legend – easy to spot on the pitch at 5-foot-7, in no hurry, picking his perfect spots – has dominated during in his MLS debut, dazzling us in the dog days of summer with 11 goals and eight assists in 11 games.

His arrival a boon to MLS Season Pass, with the Apple-owned subscription service more than doubling its numbers since Messi joined Inter Miami on July 21. Online, clips of his oft-timely exploits, of him “making the impossible regular,” as one fan Christian Ramirez put it Sunday, seem always to be trending on social media.

I’ve started seeing pink Inter Miami jerseys at my kid’s elementary school, at the grocery store, at the mall – almost as if Messi played for a local team.

The who’s-who list of celebrity RSVPs for Sunday’s match sparkled and included some superstar peers from other sports, like LeBron and Magic Johnson, James Harden, Mookie Betts, Clayton Kershaw and, from next door, USC quarterback Caleb Williams.

But then, I already knew L.A. loved Messi. I was with Argentines at a bar in Pico Rivera early on Dec. 18 to watch him lead Argentina to the World Cup championship, and I witnessed hundreds of Messi’s countrymen and women spill out into the Southern California sunshine to dance and sing, hug and cry.

I imagine some of them were partying still Sunday at BMO, where Inter Miami improved to 7-0-4 with him putting, after having been 8-14-4 when he arrived.

Many came from farther for Messi’s one West Coast date on the schedule; Gabriel Quevedo, 19, drove down Sunday from San Francisco, where he’s lived since moving from Argentina six years ago. He didn’t care who won, he said: “I just feel so good to see my idol,” he said.

Jess Knofler, 21, drove up from Irvine with her parents, Amy and Dan: “He has been my soccer hero since I was 5,” said Jess, who grew up a petite forward like Messi who grew up watching his highlights before all of her matches. watching Messi highlights before her matches. So being in the stadium Sunday? “Amazing!”

Messi signed with Inter Miami as a designated player and is under contract through 2025, with an option for 2026, reportedly making between $50 million and $60 million a year with revenue-sharing agreements with both Apple TV and Adidas.

And there’s only one Messi, but there are other top-tier soccer players who’d entertain coming to play here too, who’d also woo an American audience with our healthy appetite for star power. Who could continue a legacy that’s being laid down like Messi, and before him, David Beckham, a two-time MLS champion with the Galaxy and now co-owner of Inter Milan.

But that’s so much harder than it should be, because the MLS salary budget is $5,210,000 per team, excluding DPs and allocation money. The salary cap is just 6.2% of what NHL (the next-most financially limited American major men’s league) teams are permitted to spend annually.

Those conservative limits helped make MLS financially stable when it was getting off the ground, but with Messi mania in raging, the 28-year-old league could be taking flight. The goal shouldn’t be to be just viable, but to dazzle on a different level. For the Messi effect to be lasting.

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