Cote: The power of Messi shows in Inter Miami’s latest coaching change | Opinion
None of what Inter Miami is doing seems justified, logical or fair when it comes to the handling of its head coaches — and yet it is unsurprising and even understandable.
This is the collateral cost when Lionel Messi, the biggest and most powerful athlete on Earth, is calling the shots because all know that making Messi happy is the priority.
Athletes run sports now, not coaches. Star players lead that power grid. And beyond superstars on Messi’s uncrowded echelon are in charge to a degree no head coach will be hired or kept without Messi’s blessing.
It is naive to think otherwise, just as it stretches credulity to believe Inter Miami head coach Javier Mascherano — four months after leading the team to its first MLS Cup championship — resigned this week for “personal reasons” and was not forced out.
Because this not a normal MLS team. This is Team Messi.
This Argentine megastar has been a cash cow elevating an entire league since his arrival in South Florida in July 2023. He is bigger than Inter Miami. There is a “Leo Messi Stand” in the new stadium, the rarest of honors for an active player. Messi has not spoken to the Miami media for 2 1/2 years, because he doesn’t have to and nobody can make him. Club owner Jorge Mas and founder/president David Beckham have no larger job than to keep a smile on the face of their franchise and the league.
Anecdotal numbers on Messi’s international impact: Taylor Swift has 280 million Instagram followers. LeBron James has 157 million. Donald rump has 44 million. Lionel Messi has 512 million. That’s more followers than the population of the United States — more than in every country on the planet except India and China.
That popularity is paralleled by power.
By no logic should Mascherano be gone as a reigning-champion coach whose team was 3-1 with three draws in seven matches in this still-young season. But Messi was livid when Miami recently was eliminated in the Round of 16 from the Concacaf Champions Cup tournament. And Messi took it as a personal embarrassment that Miami settled for ties against mediocre MLS foes in its first two games at its brand new Miami Freedom Park stadium. Macherano was a ripe scapegoat.
No surprise the replacement coach, Guillermo Hoyos, is Messi’s longtime friend, a confidant, a mentor of his since Messi was a teenager. Messi, his father and Hoyos form the player’s tightest of inner circles. That carried more weight than the fact Hoyos is light on resume’ or accomplishment as a coach. And the fact that in Hoyos’ previous role as sporting director, he assembled the surrounding roster that disappointed in the Champions Cup and failed to win its first two games in the new facility.
“He helped me a lot from the moment he arrived at Barcelona,” Messi said of Hoyos in 2005. “He was with me at all times. He gave me advice, taught me things and did everything possible so that I could be where I am today, in the first division.”
The coach before Mascherano, Gerard (Tata) Martino, probably didn’t deserve to be replaced, either, although that at least came in the wake of a shocking MLS first-round playoff ouster by underdog Atlanta — another unacceptable embarrassment to Messi (even though the star did not play especially well, for him, in that series). Like Mascherano, Martino resigned for “personal reasons” but clearly was nudged out.
Miami lost that series because the Atlanta goalkeeper had the games of his life, stopping bullets. And Martino had just led Miami to the Supporters’ Shield for best record in MLS. No matter. He was gone and in came Mascherano, hired largely because of his relationship with Messi.
Martino also had benefitted from a past relationship with Messi when he was hired to replace coach Phil Neville. Neville was let go two weeks before Messi announced he was coming to America and Miami. Coincidental timing? Or far likelier that Messi, contingent on his arrival, made clear he would not play for a coach he didn’t know so knighted Martino?
Hoyos becomes Inter Miami’s fifth coach in six years, conveying franchise instability. But there is a method to the madness. The last four of those coaches were in or out at least largely on Messi’s command.
And here’s the thing:
Inter Miami knew exactly what it was getting in Messi, still great even as he turns 39 in June. They were getting a brilliant maestro on the pitch, the G.O.A.T. of G.O.A.T.s, an athlete whose unparalleled global magnetism would lift the entire stature of Major League Soccer and transform Inter Miami from a losing, under-radar club to the most popular in the league, and a champion.
But as part of that package they were also getting a manically driven, demanding beyond-superstar, a diva on the dribble who would use every ounce of the power and influence he has earned ... with head coaches who deserved better sometimes the unfortunate casualties in his wake.
Dare say Inter Miami and its diehard fans would make that deal all over again in a heartbeat, not so much in acceptance of this reality but in embrace of it:
This is not a normal team. This is Team Messi.
