2023-07-15 03:22:28
To extend the most exuberant individual retrospective in world football, Lionel Messi will have to give Inter Miami a complete turnaround, one of the worst teams of the season in the North American League (MLS).
The franchise, which has former star David Beckham as co-owner, trusts the arrival of the Argentine star, who will be presented on Sunday in style, to reverse its worst sequence of results since entering the MLS in 2020.
To get the team back on track, Messi will have the support of veteran Spanish midfielder Sergio Busquets, who is also expected at Sunday’s event.
Inter is running against time to finalize the signing of other former teammates of the Argentine in Barcelona, as Jordi Alba, while Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino was hired to manage the team. He has managed Messi twice at Barça and in the national team. Argentinano big titles.
— Inter Miami CF (@InterMiamiCF) June 7, 2023
The Florida team accumulates ten consecutive games without a win, including seven consecutive defeats, which made it sink to the bottom of the Eastern Conference with 18 points in 21 rounds.
The North American championship, however, has a format conducive to surprises. With 13 matches to be played, Inter is 11 points away from the playoff places, for which 16 of the 29 teams qualify.
After a first phase with an unprecedented modality of best of three games, the knockout duels will be played in a single game in the stadiums of the best classifieds of the regular phase, as well as the final on December 9th.
“In the playoffs, anything can happen. We’ve seen that sometimes the last teams beat the first,” MLS sporting director Alfonso Mondelo told AFP this week.
“That’s what makes this championship a little bit more different and exciting. There’s a postseason like in the NBA or the NFL and it’s another world,” he said. “There the competition is open to everyone.”
Cast under renewal
In addition to the MLS title, Messi’s Inter will also compete in the Leagues Cup, a pioneering tournament that will bring together 47 teams from the North American and Mexican leagues for a month. The Rosario star should debut with Inter’s pink shirt in the opening of the League Cup, on July 21, against Cruz Azul.
The third, smaller competition of the year is the US Open Cup, in which Inter are in the semifinals and which guarantees the winner a place in the 2024 Concacaf Champions Cup, via access to the Club World Cup.
Inter’s sporting results never matched the ambitions expressed by Beckham and the other owners of the franchise.
His first ‘bombastic signings’, Frenchman Blaise Matuidi and Argentinean Gonzalo Higuaín, reached the end of their careers and failed to turn the game around for a franchise that only played one round of the playoffs since 2020.
This season, Inter replaced the retired Higuaín with the Venezuelan Josef Martínez who, after a serious knee injury, did not return to the form with which he won the 2018 MVP award.
Between Martínez and the Ecuadorian Leonardo Campana, another striker who could keep up with Messi, they only have 10 goals. Mexican midfielder Rodolfo Pizarro, perhaps the squad’s greatest talent, has never established himself in Miami and is on his way out to leave a franchise vacancy for Messi or Busquets.
Several players who are not yet 20 years old play in midfield, like the Argentine Benjamin Cremaschi. At the rear, the team has two experienced defenders: the Ukrainian Sergiy Kryvtsov and the Canadian Kamal Miller, who have not been able to prevent Inter from being the fourth most leaked defense (33).
Reunion with Martino
Inter’s results crisis led to the dismissal, in June, of English coach Phil Neville, whose position, after a brief period occupied by an interim, was taken over this week by Gerardo Martino.
Also born in Rosario, ‘Tata’ Martino managed Messi during a season at Barcelona (2013-14) that ended with just one Spanish Super Cup title.
Soon after, Martino took over the Argentina national team for another brief stint that ended with two disappointing defeats in the 2015 and 2016 Copa América finals to Chile on penalties.
The coach, after an erased spell with the Mexican national team, is now reunited with Messi in a championship in which he experienced one of the greatest victories of his career, when he led Atlanta United to the 2018 title.
First practice ft Tata Martino✅ pic.twitter.com/6kLuWRZrzl
— Inter Miami CF (@InterMiamiCF) July 10, 2023
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