Lionel Messi remains one of the biggest draws in sports, but with that comes pressure to perform

On Saturday night, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was humming with anticipation. A MLS Opening Day record 75,673 believers who all came to witness greatness. For just the third time in three years, the City of Angels gathered to watch the greatest player of his generation, Lionel Messi, step onto the venue’s sacred grass. 

They came for magic. 

They left with disappointment. 

Because once again, Messi was held scoreless in Los Angeles. 

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

When Inter Miami rolled into town as the reigning MLS Cup Champions, there was an electricity in the air that crackled like summer lightning. You could see it in the pink jerseys sprinkled across the Coliseum seats, in the Argentine flags that hung with pride, in the children perched atop their father’s shoulders, waiting to tell all their friends they saw the G.O.A.T. with their own eyes. 

But soccer is cruel when chemistry is absent. 

And chemistry, more than ever, is what Messi is missing the most. 

In previous visits to Los Angeles, the storyline was always “Messi and friends.” The friends mattered. They were more than nostalgic footnotes from FC Barcelona glory days. They were the invisible threads stitching together his brilliance.

Jordi Alba running down the left flag like a trusted shadow that could finish in the final third. 

Sergio Busquets, the maestro, orchestrating tempo with the calm of a chess grandmaster.

Luis Suárez, the Uruguayan, who can read Messi’s eyes like a classic novel. 

That quartet didn’t just play together. They breathed together. They moved as if sharing a single nervous system.

On Saturday night, two of those pillars were gone. Alba and Busquets have retired. Suárez, now a super sub, didn’t appear until the final ten minutes. What remained was Messi — still brilliant, still dangerous — but isolated, forced to manufacture moments himself rather than glide into them.

And LAFC knew it.

Every time Messi touched the ball, three black shirts swarmed him. It was organized suffocation. The defensive shape was aggressive and relentless. They understood that you don’t stop Messi with one defender. You erase his passing lanes. You close his angles. You deny him any sort of  rhythm.

The first half ended with Messi visibly frustrated, gesturing sharply toward teammates who misread his runs or delivered passes a half-second too late. That half-second is everything. That’s the difference between a curling shot into the upper corner and a blocked attempt swallowed by a center back.

“Many of the players on this team are new and playing together for the first time,” said Inter Miami head coach Javier Mascherano in Spanish after the game. “The chemistry and team construction is an ongoing process. Despite the loss, I saw a lot of positive things.” 

One of those positive things was Tadeo Allende, who entered the game in the second half and injected energy and urgency. Miami found pockets. There were flashes of Messi’s brilliance. A darting run here. A shot that just missed curling inside the net. A free kick that just barely missed its mark. The crowd rose instinctively every time Messi shaped his body to shoot, as if collectively inhaling before a fireworks show.

But the fireworks never came.

And that’s the biggest takeaway from Inter Miami’s Opening Day match as reigning champions. Messi is still the G.O.A.T., but the infrastructure around him may have mattered more than we ever wanted to admit. 

We underestimated Alba’s timing. We undervalued Busquets’ spatial intelligence. We assumed that replacing them with talented players from the same country, or upgrading the goalkeeper, or even moving the spectacle to a grander venue like the Coliseum, would preserve the alchemy.

It doesn’t work that way. Soccer isn’t a video game where ratings transfer seamlessly.

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Inside the Coliseum, that disconnect was palpable. The stadium itself seemed to lean forward each time Messi drifted into space, as if history was willing him toward one of those moments that bend time — the kind that make strangers hug and silence critics in a single swing of his left foot.

Instead, LAFC bent the night in their favor.

And yet, even in frustration, Messi remains mesmerizing.

A turn at midfield that leaves two defenders grasping air. A disguised through-ball that splits a defensive line by millimeters. The Coliseum roared throughout the match, not because he scored, but because he exists — because even contained, he alters the temperature of a match.

That’s the paradox of watching Messi in 2026. The awe is still there. The inevitability is not.

Los Angeles hasn’t seen true Messi magic yet. But maybe that moment is coming. Maybe a World Cup break on home soil will help chemistry bloom by autumn, and maybe the next time LAFC sees Inter Miami it will be under the bright lights of an MLS Cup Final that might be preordained.