Don Garber, the Major League Soccer commissioner, sheepishly admitted Sunday afternoon that like most soccer fans around the world, he did not believe the Inter Miami ownership group would be able to deliver on its dream to bring Lionel Messi to the club.
But hours before Messi’s glitzy Inter Miami introduction ceremony later that night, Garber said he was delighted they were able to seal the deal. In a wide-ranging interview with a select group of reporters, Garber heaped praise on team owners Jorge and Jose Mas and David Beckham and talked about how Messi will change MLS.
“This journey here in Miami has been an epic one,” he said. “Working with David as a player and giving him the opportunity to have an option to purchase a team, the exercise of that option, when we announced in 2014 that the team would be here in Miami.
“The strength of pro sports in any league is about local connections… When I met the Mas family years ago, there were so many things that Jorge and Jose hoped they’d be able to achieve. The process of getting a stadium done was complicated and frankly, it was overwhelming. From the very beginning, David, Jorge and Jose said, `We’re going to make this team a club you can be proud of that will represent this league around the world. And by the way, we’re going to bring in a lot of big names and special players.’ Lionel Messi was on Jorge’s radar from the very beginning. I have to say… I didn’t think that he wouldn’t be able to deliver it. But here we are today with a player that I think without doubt is a not only a generational player, but in my opinion, the greatest of all time.”
On what Messi means to MLS: ``We want MLS to be a league of choice, a league of choice for players, for fans, for partners, and ultimately for investors. And when you have the best player of all time, making Major League Soccer, his league of choice, I think it’s a real testament to where MLS is and where it’s going in the years ahead.”
On whether there are any guarantees about how many games Messi will play and if he will play on artificial turf (Charlotte and Atlanta have turf fields): “No player makes any guarantee about the number of games that they’re going to play and in all my 40 years of sports, things happen. My expectations are that Messi will continue to be a member of the Argentinian national team. There’s lots of international things going on, so he will play as much as he can play. He and [coach] Tata [Martino] and [sporting director] Chris Henderson and the rest of the technical crew will manage through all of that. Whether or not he plays on turf is really going to be up to the player. There have been no commitments one way and the other to that. I think a lot of international stars come into MLS and they are either intrigued or concerned about not playing on grass. And then you see some of the best players who’ve ever played the game play on turf. So, I think that’s a process that we’ll have to play out over time.”
Would they consider putting a temporary natural grass field over turf for those games?: “That’s going to be the decision of every club when they travel to those stadiums that don’t have natural grass. My expectations are that that’s what they will do, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to figure all of that out. As you know, MLS promotes a lot of international games. We have been able to bring natural grass into those stadiums, but we’ve never done that for regular season game.”
How instrumental was Apple in getting negotiations over the line: “This doesn’t happen without Jorge and Jose Mas and their belief in MLS and making an unprecedented investment in a player. It doesn’t happen without David Beckham. David is a quiet guy. He said early on, I’m going to bring in the world’s best players and he was able to deliver that and his influence and his MLS experience is something that I think helped convince the player that this was a place that would be good for him and good for his family. And it doesn’t happen without Apple and Apple TV. The partnership is deep. The Apple relationship with us is not a rights deal. It’s a partnership. We sat down and we said we don’t want to be just the traditional league that every few years renews a rights deal. It was about how do you find ways to take advantage of the fact that the regional business is enormously under stress? We were able to anticipate that and put all of that into a package that’s easy to consume for consumers. And it gives this league that was looking for a global opportunity the chance to be able to be exposed to the rest of the world. Apple has been a part of the conversation when things started getting very serious.”
