Major League Soccer was unable to showcase its most prized jewels at its championship game.
Lionel Messi didn’t toy with defenders in the MLS Cup final. He didn’t make any of those passes that no other player could make. He didn’t create any magic.
Messi didn’t do any of that because he wasn’t here. His team, Inter Miami, was eliminated from the postseason four weeks ago.
Standing in for Messi at the league’s flagship event on Saturday were the Galaxy and New York Red Bulls.
Neither team spent as much this season as Inter Miami, which had a league-high $40-million payroll. Neither team had the star power of Inter Miami, especially after Galaxy playmaker Riqui Puig was ruled out of the game with a torn anterior cruciate ligament sustained in the Western Conference final.
What the Galaxy and Red Bulls provided was a more accurate picture of what MLS is today.
The MLS of today is the Galaxy, who reclaimed their title as the kings of the league with a 2-1 victory over the Red Bulls at Dignity Health Sports Park after modernizing their entire operation.
The MLS of today is the Red Bulls, who are uncommonly reliant on American players developed in their own youth academy.
Messi and Inter Miami are part of this ecosystem. They won’t be for long, however. Whenever the 37-year-old Messi retires or moves on, teams such as the Galaxy and Red Bulls will be what remains.
The Galaxy used to be a scaled-down version of what Inter Miami is now, building around world-famous players on the back ends of their careers. The approach became less effective as the level of play in MLS improved, leading them to change how they constructed their roster.
Instead of searching the transfer market for one of Messi’s contemporaries, the Galaxy targeted a couple of youthful wingers in 26-year-old Joseph Paintsil of Ghana and 23-year-old Gabriel Pec of Brazil.
Both players were almost entirely unknown in the United States before this season, but they weren’t brought in to be shiny objects. They were brought in to win games. In the MLS Cup final, Paintsil scored on a ninth-minute through ball from Gaston Brugman and Dejan Joveljic on a 13th-minute solo run from midfield.
Paintsil and Pec will almost certainly have chances to move to Europe. Then again, they could elect to do what Puig did.
If the Galaxy caught up to the MLS’s elite teams by acquiring the likes of Paintsil and Pec, they moved ahead of them by signing Puig to a contract extension this year.
Puig was an unusual MLS signing in that he was a young player who was already at a top European team. The Spaniard was only 22 when the Galaxy acquired him from Barcelona.
The expectation around the game was that Puig would return to Europe as soon as he established himself as a professional. That didn’t happen. Earlier this year, the Galaxy announced they signed Puig to an extension through the 2027 season.
Puig, who finished the regular season with 13 goals and 15 assists, could become the best player in the history of this league. Messi’s stay in MLS will be brief. The two other players who dominated the league to a similar degree, Carlos Vela of LAFC and Sebastian Giovinco of Toronto FC, also had relatively short stays in MLS.
Puig could spend the overwhelming majority of his career here. He has already become a cult hero in these parts, the stadium erupting in heartfelt cries of appreciation when he was shown on the video scoreboard cheering on his team in the closing minutes.
This might not carry much significance to the sports world at large, but it matters to the people who packed Dignity Health Sports Park.
This league has a developed culture of its own, which explains why an estimated 2,000 Red Bulls fans traveled from the New York area to watch this game or why obnoxious scoring-champion-turned-broadcaster Taylor Twellman was booed in the postgame ceremony as if he were NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell at the draft.
Dignity Health Sports Park provided an appropriate setting for the show. The country’s oldest soccer-specific stadium that is still in use, the 27,000-seat venue has aged gracefully over the last 21 years.
The stadium isn’t old enough to feel outdated but is old enough to have acquired character.
This was where Landon Donovan and David Beckham played, where Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored that goal, where Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy made their last World Cup appearances. That history is now a part of the venue, and there’s a certain feeling inside its gates. The game on Saturday will add to that.
That doesn’t mean this wasn’t a lost opportunity. This was.
Messi and his team choked and MLS was deprived of its dream final. What the league presented instead wasn’t for everyone, but it was for someone.
