MLS too easy for Lionel Messi and Inter Miami; how can they fix the ‘Beckham rule’?

Lionel Messi returned to action last weekend for the first time since injuring an ankle in the Copa America final back in July.

Within half an hour, he’d scored twice against the Philadelphia Union. By full time he’d also added an assist.

That performance in Inter Miami’s 3-1 win took Messi’s tally for the season to 14 MLS goals and 14 assists (according to the MLS system in which two assists can be attributed to each goal). He has now played only 14 games after Wednesday night’s substitute appearance v Atalanta.

The players he is rubbing shoulders with in the scoring and creating charts have literally played twice as many games as the 37-year-old megastar.

With five games to play in the regular season, he is five goals behind Christian Benteke in the race for the Golden Boot and four assists behind Luciano Acosta’s league-leading mark. Although it is unlikely, you wouldn’t bet against him finishing as the top scorer, top assist-maker or even the MVP. Or all three, for that matter.

One thing that is as good as certain is that Inter Miami will win the Supporters’ Shield – the award given to the side with the most points across the MLS regular season – for the first time since the David Beckham-backed club was founded. And they will likely do so while setting a new all-time points record.

And while Miami have proven they are more than just Messi by winning relentlessly during his three-month absence, they are this good precisely because of Messi.

With the Argentinian magician out, Luiz Suarez took his goals return to 17 for the season, Jordi Alba continued to drive the team on from the left side of the pitch and in the middle, Sergio Busquets quietly carried on making his case to be considered the club’s player of the year.

They won eight of the nine league games Messi missed and now sit eight points clear of last year’s Supporters’ Shield winners FC Cincinnati at the top of the Eastern Conference.

Busquets, who is among the highest-paid players in the league, moved to MLS slightly before Messi. But it is inconceivable that Alba and Suarez would have signed comparatively cheap deals – they each make $1.5 million a year at Chase Stadium – were it not for the presence of their former Barcelona colleague.

It all raises the question of whether this whole MLS gig is a bit too easy for Messi and Miami, and what exactly can be done to give everyone else a chance.

The American sporting landscape is a philosophical contradiction. The US is the epicentre of capitalism and its biggest sports leagues and franchises prescribe the hyper-capitalist model of infinite growth.

In this regard, they are no different to the divisions and clubs found at the top end of football throughout the world, especially in Europe. Teams in the US will often follow this philosophy to the extent that they seek to burden their cities’ taxpayers with the cost of constructing their arenas.

Like advocates of the British royal family, they attempt to justify this levying of the commonfolk by pointing to the increased tourism they bring to their locality and the trickle-down benefits to surrounding businesses.

Manchester United’s controlling co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, is attempting a similar trick to shirk the spend needed to renovate or rebuild Old Trafford.

But American sports are also founded on socialist ideas. In the nation’s most popular leagues – the NFL, the NBA, major league baseball and the NHL – the draft system is essentially a method of flattening the playing field and ring-fencing a degree of parity. Every year, the previous season’s worst team gets to pick the best prospect moving from the college ranks into the pros; the reigning champions pick last.

And unionisation is widespread. The players periodically bargain collectively for better rights, working conditions and remuneration. While broadcast rights deals continue to skyrocket, further enriching billionaire team owners, the workers (the players) have negotiated for a locked-in share of the riches.

Salary caps, in part, serve the purpose of evening the odds, too. While one function of wage limits is to spare wealthy owners from accusations of underspending, they also work to prevent mega-rich entities from entering the league and buying instant success; thus also making American teams less susceptible to becoming sport-washing vehicles.

And just as spending is capped at the upper end of the scale, there is also a lower limit that teams must stay above, guarding against the stingiest owners penny-pinching.

This is where, in order to fit into the global football landscape, MLS has had to adapt. And waters have become muddy. US soccer’s top flight also has a salary cap. For the 2024 season, that figure was set at $5.7 million.

But a little more than a decade into the league’s existence, it became clear that the salary cap would have to bend somewhat if MLS was to grow into a major player in the football world. And so what is colloquially known as the ‘Beckham rule’ – aka the ‘Designated Player rule’ – was introduced.

First created – you guessed it – to make it possible for David Beckham to sign with Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007, the Designated Player rule allows MLS clubs to sign up to three players outside of their salary cap. That’s how the Galaxy were able to offer Beckham a contract which, at $6.5 million a year, was worth more than many MLS clubs spend on their entire rosters even now.

Messi’s reported yearly salary is $20.4 million, but as a Designated Player, he carries a charge of just $683,750 against the salary cap.

The NFL operates what is known as a ‘hard cap’ where there is a fixed upper limit on how much each club can spend on wages each year, a figure that is uniform across the league. The NBA is slightly different. Basketball’s top league has a ‘soft cap’, with tiered levels of spending that can, in theory, be blazed through by the richest and most ambitious teams, but at an additional cost.

For those who wish to spend over the cap, there is a ‘luxury tax’ incurred, in which every additional dollar of salary expenditure is multiplied, with the excess redistributed throughout the league to teams complying with the cap.

And, more recently, NBA teams who consistently spend into the highest category incur further sanctions, such as forfeiting future drafts picks and having restrictions placed on their ability to trade players.

Messi, through the sheer dominance he has brought to Inter Miami, is inadvertently making the case for MLS to adopt a similar model.

After all, not all Designated Players are created equal. Messi is the highest-paid player in MLS history. His guaranteed salary is more than double the league’s third-highest earner, team-mate Busquets ($8,774,996) and more than four times as much as everyone outside the top eight earners.

Messi is also paid more than the entire rosters of 25 of the league’s 29 clubs. And all of this is before factoring in how the deal the Argentinian icon signed last year to join MLS included further incentives from league sponsors Adidas and Fanatics, plus a share of the revenue from sign-ups to Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass service.

Comparing MLS to other major US sports leagues is something of a fool’s errand due to the fact the soccer division has to straddle two very different sporting cultures and business models (Ever tried starting a Football Manager save with an MLS side? *exploding head emoji*). The sanctions that exist for the NBA’s biggest spenders would not translate directly to MLS, where the draft and the trade market are far less important.

One solution – or, at least, one attempt at mitigation – could be the introduction of a threshold over which a club’s outlay on one designated player forces them to forfeit the right to sign additional DPs; or even the forfeiture of homefield advantage for a play-off round or two. Under these circumstances, Miami and MLS would still have been able to attract Messi with the same package, only now the rest of the league might not be cut adrift by his arrival.

Attracting the eight-time Ballon d’Or winner was, of course, a monumental coup for the league and will undoubtedly drive exponential growth. Pursuing the game’s biggest stars should not be discouraged. Yet Messi’s arrival has stretched MLS’ cultural straddle to the point even Simone Biles would tweak a muscle.

When a player is being brought in not only at great expense, but also effectively as a partner of the league, and who attracts other superstars to join him on low-cost contracts that they would never even consider signing at another club, it brings sporting integrity into question.