Lionel Messi wins his first US trophy by defeating Inter Miami in the League Cup

The final of the League Cup, a tournament involving Major League Soccer (MLS) clubs and the first Mexican Liga MX division, ended with Inter Miami’s victory over Nashville in a penalty shoot-out. The club from Florida won the first tournament after the transfer of Lionel Messi, and the Argentine himself became the sole leader in the number of titles won, ahead of the Brazilian Dani Alves by one trophy.

Lionel Messi remains the premier football newsmaker in North America. After July transition from PSG to Inter Miami, he not only demonstrates excellent performance, but also won the first trophy in the new club – the League Cup. This tournament has been running since 2019. At first, four of the best clubs from MLS and Liga MX, the first Mexican division, played in it. But this season the League Cup was decided to expand. All the clubs of the two leagues got the opportunity to take part in it, a total of 47. First they were divided into 15 groups, and then sorted out the relationship according to the knockout system.

The decisive match, which took place in Nashville, brought together a team from this city, which was eliminated in the first round of the play-offs in last year’s MLS draw, and the current team of Lionel Messi, which then showed a similar result. The meeting turned out to be stubborn. In the middle of the first half, Messi opened the scoring with a magnificent shot from outside the penalty area from the left foot into the nine, and in the second half, the Haitian Fafa Pico, as a result of the turmoil that arose near the Inter Miami goal after a corner and several rebounds, equalized. After that, the Inter players, including Messi, who landed on the post, missed a couple of sure chances to score the winning goal.

As a result, the main time ended in a draw – 1: 1, and everything was decided by a penalty shootout. She got very drawn out. At first, the opponents did not realize one shot out of five, but then there were no misses, and the duel of two goalkeepers decided everything.

This is where the climax came. Inter goalkeeper Drake Callender was able to deflect a shot from his colleague Elliot Panicko and brought his team a 10-9 win.

Thus, for the first time, a team representing MLS won the League Cup (in 2019 and 2021, it was won by clubs from the Mexican championship, and the tournament was not held twice more for various reasons). For Inter Miami, which, in addition to the 36-year-old Messi, was replenished by two more former Barcelona players, the 35-year-old midfielder Sergio Busquets and 34-year-old defender Jordi Alba, this is a great success.

As for the outstanding Argentine, he won his 44th trophy and set a new football record for most titles, bettering the record of 43 different competition winner Dani Alves of Brazil.

As part of Barcelona, ​​Messi won the Spanish Championship ten times, the Spanish Super Cup eight times, the Spanish Cup seven times, the Champions League four times, the Super Cup and the Club World Cup three times each. With PSG, he won the French championship twice and the Super Cup once, and as part of the Argentina national team he won the World Cup, the America’s Cup, the Olympic Games, the World Youth Championship and the Finalissime – the official match in which the European champion and the winner of the America’s Cup meet.

To this we can add that, having played seven meetings for Inter, Messi scored in each of them, and in total he scored ten goals. This put him in a clean third place on Inter Miami’s 2018 top scorer list. He is second only to Gonzalo Higuain of Argentina with 29 goals and Ecuadorian Leonardo Campana with 16 accurate shots.

Evgeny Fedyakov