Lionel Messi has made Miami America’s new soccer capital. Will it last?

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In Scarface, Tony Montana is driving through Miami on a balmy summer night, top down, his car upholstered in understated tiger print.

“Me, I want what’s coming to me,” he says to his compadre, Manny.

“And what’s coming to you?” Montana gets asked.

“The world, Chico, and everything in it.”

The Club World Cup has come to Miami this summer. The World Cup is next. The One Year Out celebration held at the city’s Perez Art Museum on June 11 made that feel real.

“First of all, we’re more than qualified to host it, as we know,” the Latin Grammy winner and Miami native Marc Anthony said. “We’ve hosted from Super Bowls to Formula 1.” Maybe the less said about last year’s Copa America final, the better.

At a conference in Coral Gables, Nicolo Zini, a business executive for the host committee, talked about “real momentum” and the importance of the Club World Cup acting as a signpost that the World Cup is on its way.

“It is not a minor selling point,” Zini added. Miami did not have a game at the 1994 World Cup. “The stadium wasn’t ready. It went to Orlando.”

FIFA’s Miami 2026 World Cup countdown clock is unveiled earlier this month (Ivan Apfel/Getty Images)

Anticipation is building and has been ever since Inter Miami persuaded Lionel Messi to play in MLS.

Away from the Art Deco curves and sandy pavements of Miami Beach, the boxiness of Wynwood has provided a canvas for more than the pastel colours that made this city famous through the outfits of Don Johnson in Miami Vice. It is home to the world’s first graffiti museum.

Pedestrians on the sidewalk find themselves in the shadow of cherry-pickers, not palm trees. The pop and shake of spray paint cans alternates with the rat-a-tat-tat of spluttering exhausts from Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

Messi looms large in this neighbourhood. He smiles down from murals, as he does outside the Fiorito in Little Haiti, a steakhouse named after the Buenos Aires barrio where Diego Maradona grew up. It’s a place where some of the area’s 58,000 Argentinians come for blood sausage, empanadas and a vacio-cut so good you order it for main and dessert.

Framed on the wall are a pair of red and yellow cards signed by Hector Elizondo, the Argentine referee who sent off Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup final. A Boca Juniors basketball game is on the TV. It is niche.

Messi isn’t everywhere in Miami. He plays and trains on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale, where autograph hunters all the way from Tucuman wait on the corner for his Maybach to turn into the Florida Blue Training Center.

This is a sprawling place and as such, you can ride around for hours without seeing Messi — apart from, every now and again, on towering freeway billboards where he competes for advertising space with injury lawyers, pharmaceuticals and air conditioning units.

You don’t need a car collection like the Miami Heat’s legendary coach Pat Riley to get around the city, but you do need to drive. It is one big Scalextric track with rising, bending interchanges that look like albino anacondas surging out of the Everglades.

(Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images)

F1’s recent success here makes sense. The number of cars is perhaps why the city’s most famous pieces of architecture are the stacked garages, like the Herzog & de Meuron one on 111 Lincoln Road. It is why the Hard Rock Stadium has 26,718 parking spaces.

You reach it via Dan Marino Boulevard and Don Shula Drive, a pair of greats in Miami Dolphins lore. It is a reminder that the other football remains America’s Game.

Shula’s passing was a big moment in Miami sports. On the way to the mixed zone at the Hard Rock, you pass the 72 Club, a hospitality experience named after the team Shula coached in 1972; the one and only team in NFL history to go an entire season undefeated.

And yet, even as the Florida Panthers vied for and won the Stanley Cup during the group stage of FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s new, expanded Club World Cup, fans turned out for the the competition in Miami.

As much as half-empty stadiums were a focus of the coverage, the teal-coloured 65,000-seater Hard Rock averaged crowds of 60,000 over the first fortnight of the tournament.

Some of that was down to the magnetic Messi effect. It was no coincidence that FIFA chose Inter Miami to raise the curtain on the Club World Cup against Al Ahly.

The Hard Rock record, however, was for the Bayern Munich-Boca Juniors game. That, in no small part, spoke to the aforementioned Argentine diaspora — the irrationality of the Boca fans and their willingness to follow their team not only to Miami but, as their striker Miguel Merentiel said, “to the moon, even”.

On the other, it highlighted, as Real Madrid–Al Hilal did too, that there is a market for football in Miami that isn’t totally dependent on Messi.

Madrid es Madrid, after all. The biggest club of all. And Americans love a winner. They love stars. And although predictable, it was striking nonetheless to see the pull Real Madrid has on Hispanic and Latino fans outside of Spain.

“Miami is a city with Latin American passion that loves soccer and has recently had the privilege of enjoying the magic of Messi and company,” Infantino said on the eve of the opening game. “Not only that, it is also home to FIFA and Concacaf.”

Boca Juniors fans congregate at Miami Beach before their Club World Cup match against Bayern Munich (Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)

Joan Didion, the great writer and journalist, once observed that Miami isn’t an American city but a “tropical capital,” a “Latin capital, a year or two away from a new government.”

No matter where the World Cup is hosted, the government is — if not overthrown — then superseded, in a purely sporting sense, by FIFA.

That won’t happen in the U.S. but FIFA moved their legal and compliance division to Coral Gables because it makes logistical and geographic sense. After the Copa America, the Club World Cup and the men’s World Cup, the next editions of the women’s tournament will be held in Brazil and then the U.S..

It feels like FIFA and Messi have made Miami the football capital of America — something that Seattle, LA, Atlanta and St. Louis will no doubt dispute, but the growth potential here is remarkable.

Over half of the population in Miami-Dade is foreign-born, and Spanish is the main language spoken at home and on the street.

Historically, that population was drawn from nearby Cuba, which is only 90 miles off the coast. Jorge Mas Canosa, the father of David Beckham’s co-owners at Inter Miami, Jorge and Jose, was one of many who exiled from Cuba after the rise of Fidel Castro.

The received wisdom assumed Cubans were interested in baseball, track and field, and boxing: not soccer.

When shown reconnaissance photos of football pitches in Cienfuegos in 1970, the U.S.’s then-national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, demanded to see President Richard Nixon immediately.

“Those soccer fields could mean war, Bob,” he told an incredulous White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who in turn asked: “How come?”.

“Cubans play baseball,” Kissinger said. “Russians play soccer.”

And yet, Cuba sent a team to the 1938 World Cup, where they beat Romania in extra time and reached the quarter-finals.

Messi celebrates at Hard Rock Stadium, where he also won Copa America (Photo: Michael Pimentel/ISI Photos/ISI Photos via Getty Images)

More recently, Miami has become a haven for Latin America’s affluent and aspirational. It is a city that teems with people for whom soccer is the primary sport.

Miami United tried to tap into it by signing Adriano. Miami FC, a joint venture between media rights empresario Riccardo Silva and Milan legend Paolo Maldini, had a go and still continue in the USL Championship. Only Inter Miami, however, were granted a license as an MLS expansion team.

The hispanic and Latino demography of South Florida means support is fragmented. Think about it. Not everyone is Argentine. Not everyone is a Messi fan.

Some 240k in the Miami-Dade and Broward counties are Colombian, and they made their presence felt at the Hard Rock for last summer’s Copa America final, which Messi’s Argentina won in extra time. The two nations met again in a World Cup qualifier that preceded the start of the Club World Cup.

But the roster Inter Miami have built is representative of the city and South America. Benjamin Cremaschi is born and raised in Miami, the son of Argentine parents. Telasco Segovia is Venezuelan, Luis Suarez and Maximiliano Falcon are Uruguayan, Leo Afonso is Brazilian, David Martinez is Paraguayan and Allen Obando is Ecuadorean.

“The best thing about Miami as you have seen or will see,” Inter Miami’s president of business operations Xavi Asensi said at a conference held by the Argentine newspaper Ole, “is that it is very near America.”

Its proximity to more established football cultures and the conceptualisation of Inter Miami as a team not only of America but the Americas too is a benefit. Jorge Mas recently told ESPN he would like Inter Miami to one day compete in the Copa Libertadores.

The brand, choice of name, colours and crest, and its association with Beckham has allowed Inter Miami to resonate far and wide.

But if the pink Messi No 10 jersey is MLS’s best seller and is seen in Hong Kong, Cape Town, Buenos Aires and London, it is, by Asensi’s admission, because of Messi. His star power is not to be underestimated. Palermo pink would sell if Messi were in it.

“At Inter Miami,” Asensi said. “Leo is bigger than the club.”

Revenues have tripled since he joined. In April, Colombus Crew moved their regular-season home game against Inter Miami to the Cleveland Browns’ stadium to meet demand for tickets. “Wherever we go, it’s like The Rolling Stones,” Asensi explained. Playing at the much bigger Hard Rock rather than Chase Stadium, their backyard in MLS, has not posed a challenge. Both group-stage games Inter Miami played there fetched crowds of 60k.

It raises the question: why will Freedom Park, the new ground Inter Miami are building near Miami International Airport, have only a 25k capacity? It is, in fairness, a size in line with other MLS, soccer-first grounds in the U.S.. It perhaps also reflects a realism. Messi turned 38 earlier this week and while Jorge Mas wants him to retire at Inter Miami, that retirement is ever nearer.

How long, if at all, will Messi carry on playing beyond next summer’s World Cup? He has said, even during this Club World Cup, that these are his “final games.” The end is coming. Who then will buy Inter Miami jerseys when they can’t put Messi 10 on the back? Who will watch them when he is in the executive box rather than on the pitch?

The hope is that the Messi effect has a legacy. That the kids who have come to see him at Chase Stadium these past two and a half years become fans of the game, of Inter Miami in general and not just him. That the city, as Infantino desires, “writes its name in gold letters” as major soccer destination.

The world and everything in it has come to Miami. But, after Messi, after the World Cup, will it stay there?

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)

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