After Messi’s transfer to Inter Miami, ticket prices for the club’s matches have increased many times over

The unexpected transfer of the best football player of the century, Lionel Messi, from PSG to Inter Miami, literally within a few hours after the Argentinean announced it, provoked a huge increase in interest in the American club. Ticket prices for his matches have increased many times over, and the number of club Twitter subscribers has quadrupled to 4.5 million people. It seems that thanks to the “Messi effect”, Inter Miami and MLS, the US football league, will be able to recoup their huge, by their standards, investments in the seven-time winner of the Golden Ball, the fight for which they managed to win over two competitors that seemed to be their absolute favorites – “ Barcelona” and ready to literally overwhelm the legend with the money of the Saudi “Al-Hilal”.

Resources TickPick, TicketIQ and TicketSmarter published data on the tremendous growth in recent hours in demand for American League MLS club Inter Miami. He will open the next season on July 21 with a meeting in the League Cup tournament against the Mexican Cruz Azul in his field.

On Wednesday afternoon, the cheapest ticket for this game on the secondary market was $29. In the evening, the price for it rose almost 20 times, to $544. It’s the same story with MLS matches.

Inter Miami kicks off its future league on August 26 when it hosts the New York Red Bulls DRV PNK at its 19,100-seat stadium. Within half a day on Wednesday, the cheapest ticket for it went up from $30 to $512. On September 3, Inter Miami will play the reigning MLS champion Los Angeles. The cost of the cheapest ticket to the meeting has risen from $81 to $599. According to TicketIQ, the average price of attending a home game of Inter Miami, which is not included in the list of league giants, and last season, having modestly played the regular championship, was eliminated already in the starting round of the play-offs, has grown from $152 in the same short period of time. up to $935, that is, by 515%. But ticket prices for the club’s away matches have also risen radically. For example, the cheapest one for a meeting with Charlotte went up from $42 to $356, by 748%.

Another illustration of the phenomenal surge in interest in Inter Miami is his official Twitter. At the beginning of the week, the number of its subscribers amounted to approximately 1 million people. By night from Wednesday to Thursday, it had increased to 4.5 million.

TicketSmarter CEO Jeff Goodman said in an interview USA Todaythat the numbers just prove “what a massive acquisition Inter Miami and MLS in general have been.” This, of course, is about the transition, which is doomed to remain the loudest in the current offseason.

It was late on Wednesday evening (in the USA it was the height of the day) about the transition from PSG to Inter Miami in an interview with Spanish publications Mundo Deportivo And Sport

said Lionel Messi. He clarified that he did not agree on the terms of the contract with the club “one hundred percent”, but “decided to continue his journey there.”

Explaining his motivation for choosing, the Argentine added that he felt “it was his turn to be in the US league and live football differently than before”, “enjoying it day after day”. The club is due to officially announce the deal on July 1.

This news has become such a notable event, which has not happened in world football for a long time. Lionel Messi for the first time in his professional career, which started in 2003, left Europe, changing it to the MLS championship, which was unprepossessing compared to the Big Five championships, just after the season that radically transformed his status. The victory of the Argentina national team at the end of last year at the World Cup in Qatar, obtained primarily thanks to the brilliant performance of its leader, turned the seven-time winner of the Golden Ball from a simply outstanding football player into an undisputed football king, equal to the brightest legends in the history of the game – Pele and Diego Maradona. And the loudness of Messi’s act was added by the fact that among the options he had for continuing his career, he preferred the seemingly least obvious one.

That Lionel Messi will not renew the expiring contract with PSG, in which he ended up in 2021, having escaped from the then-crisis Barcelona, ​​and with which he had just won the French title, has been known for several weeks. As well as the fact that three clubs claim the best player of the century. Two of them looked like favorites with approximately equal chances in this fight. “Barcelona” – because it is actually the native club of the Argentinean. In her academy, he matured as a player. In her form, he then entered the field for more than a decade and a half and won many team and individual trophies before, having quarreled with the previous management, he said goodbye to her and left for Paris. Joan Laporta, who took over the post of President of Barcelona just in 2021, has repeatedly promised its fans to make every effort to return their beloved Argentine to them, and Messi has repeatedly made it clear that he is not opposed to returning and ending his career in the main team of his life. The BBC and other sources have no doubt that the nuances of Spanish and Union of European Football Association (UEFA) regulations thwarted him in the first place. By signing Messi, Barcelona, ​​already spending a lot of money lately, seriously risked violating the provisions of both domestic and continental financial fair play.

The second logical option was club “Al-Hilal”, representing Sadovskaya Arabia. This season, she opened a real hunt for football superstars. There are already two Ballon d’Or players in the Saudi league – Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and France’s Karim Benzema. And the list of sonorous names that have already been lured to Sadovskaya Arabia or are about to be lured is not exhausted by them. At the same time, Al-Hilal, not constrained by any regulations, was preparing to bring down something like a money waterfall on Messi. Various media resources that estimated his future salary at the club featured space figures from $300 million to $600 million.

The trump cards of Inter Miami looked more modest against this background. The indisputable ones could only include a friend of Lionel Messi, the most popular English footballer in the past, David Beckham, as president and co-owner of the club, and a house in Florida owned by the Argentine, which, as it turned out, he has long loved. But MLS and its members are still unlikely to compete with European and emerging Saudi giants in generosity, although it often attracts celebrities in their pre-retirement age.

However, sources such as The Athletic And ESPN, we are sure that in the case of the surprise alliance of Lionel Messi and the team from Florida, the financial factor was of great importance. In fact, at least close to the one he had at PSG (about €40 million a year, according to L’Equipe), Messi could not count on a salary provided directly by the club at Inter Miami.

Player contracts in the MLS, like in other American sports leagues, have a salary cap. For example, before the news of Messi’s transfer, the league’s most expensive contracts were topped by Swiss Xherdan Shaqiri of the Chicago Fire.

According to him, he was guaranteed $ 8.15 million annually. However, it’s not about the striker’s formal salary, but about what the BBC calls the “collaboration” with the brands provided for in the agreement.

These brands are Apple TV and Adidas. The first in the spring signed a ten-year agreement with MLS for the purchase of media rights for a total of $2.5 billion. The second at about the same time became a major partner of the league, signing an agreement for six years and $830 million. Since 2017, Adidas has been cooperating directly with Messi. So, The Athletic and ESPN are convinced that the Argentine is entitled to deductions from two companies. At Apple TV, they are tightly tied to an increase in the number of subscribers to the service after the arrival of an Argentine in the US.

Maiami Herald, citing its own sources, predicts that Lionel Messi will sign a contract with Inter Miami for a period of two and a half years with the option of extending for another season. And its actual cost, including bonuses, will be from $125 million to $150 million.

Wednesday’s events confirm ESPN’s story, which, while predicting that the investment in Lionel Messi will more than pay off, insists that the “Messi effect” should be much more powerful than the effect that the appearance of such outstanding players in the 1970s in the American championship as Pele, Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer, and already in this century some football frontmen of the next generations – David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The channel’s experts clarify that half a century ago, it was reduced by low “information density” by today’s standards, and its newly won absolutely exceptional status, coupled with the luck of the moment, makes it a winning asset in comparison with Beckham and Ibrahimovic Messi. After all, the driver of the growth of interest in football in North America, along with Lionel Messi himself, it is possible that the future World Cup will turn out to be. This tournament in 2026 will be jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Alexey Dospekhov