Is Lionel Messi Really That Good or Are MLS Defenses Just Bad?
Maybe you thought about it during his first goal of the night, eight minutes into the game, when he ran onto a lofted pass over the top from Sergio Busquets and looked a little surprised to find that the nearest Atlanta United defender was several beach towns away.
Or maybe it occurred to you after his second, when he strolled across a vast expanse of empty Florida grasslands, slid the ball to an undefended teammate, and got it back in front of goal for a tap-in.
Surely by the time he assisted Inter Miami’s fourth goal of the night, a hilariously easy counterattack in which he dribbled most of the way up the middle of the pitch without an opponent so much as gesturing in his general direction, you started to have your suspicions.
Is Lionel Messi really this good, you wondered, or are MLS defenses this bad?
Let’s answer the last part first: yes, the defending was really bad. Atlanta’s structure was a mess, the marking was hopeless, the shot-stopping nonexistent. It happens. In particular, it happens a lot in MLS in late July when the sweltering heat in cities like Fort Lauderdale sends goal-scoring through the roof.
There are bigger structural reasons why MLS teams can’t seem to keep the ball out of their net. Ever since David Beckham joined the league in 2007, MLS Commissioner Don Garber has signed off on a series of increasingly convoluted rules that allow ambitious owners in this salary-capped league to invest more in their squad but not in the way they might want to. It’s easy now to spend a lot of money on a few great players, which is useful for marketing, but hard to spread it around to a lot of pretty good players, which might be useful for playing better football.
The result of this enforced inequality is that MLS is heavily skewed toward attacking talent, which offers more star power or higher potential transfer value to justify the biggest paychecks. In the English Premier League, which has fewer restrictions on spending, the average forward earns 31 percent more than the average defender, according to estimates from the website Capology. In MLS, that same gap is 150 percent. The guys scoring the goals and the ones trying to stop them might as well be playing different sports.
Atlanta United, the first MLS opponent Messi has had the pleasure of picking on (albeit in a standalone midseason tournament), are especially top-heavy: they’ve scored the third-most goals per game in league play but conceded the third-most, too. This is not a good defense even by MLS standards. It wasn’t exactly a shock that the greatest player of all time might find a way to hang a couple of goals on a team that gave up six to the Columbus Crew.
After all, he’s Messi. This is what he does. Yes, he scored two goals and assisted one in his first game against an MLS defense. That’s very good. But he did the same thing in the first game last season in Ligue 1. Not long after that, he scored two and assisted two in a Champions League match. He also scored two goals, you may recall, in last year’s World Cup final against France. Which he won. Because he scores against everybody.
He didn’t do anything against Atlanta that he hasn’t done to countless other teams in every league he’s played in. He wandered constantly in and out of defenders’ zones, making it hard for them to keep track of who was responsible for him. If a center-back got too close, he would drop deep in Miami’s build-up where they couldn’t follow, and if they tried to pursue him into midfield he would spin them around on the dribble or sprint behind for a through-ball. Marking Messi has always been like trying to catch a cloud in a butterfly net.
And yeah, sure, he’ll probably have an easier time finding space and beating defenders in MLS than in Europe. That’s what happens when you move from some of the world’s best leagues to a less good one. If MLS is worried that too much of this might make the league look bad, they don’t even have to raise the league’s salary cap — they can start by loosening the rules that control how clubs spend their money, making it easier to invest in defense.
But it’s not like this is the first time a league’s competitive structure has smoothed the way for Messi to score lots of goals. In La Liga, where an overwhelming TV revenues went to big clubs like Barcelona, and in Ligue 1, where PSG had the financial backing of a petroleum-rich nation-state, he routinely faced defenses that didn’t stand a chance against him. At least in MLS, where he joined the worst team in the league, the systemic issues affect Messi’s team as much as their opponents.
Are MLS defenses this bad? Yeah, they are, including Inter Miami’s.
Is Messi really this good? Of course he is. Always has been.
And if that means we’re in for lots more goals — well, what’s so bad about that?