In a way, and despite the look’s exhausting proliferation throughout the league, the white and black uniforms worn by Inter Miami during its first two MLS seasons were appropriate for a club that failed to live up to its early promise. For a while now, Inter’s brand has been delayed gratification.
It took six years for club founder David Beckham to arrange an ownership group, find a place to play and put a team on the field. That field wasn’t inside a brand-new, state-of-the-art soccer palace in Miami, but in an interim modular facility around 30 miles north in Ft. Lauderdale. And that team, absent the kind of blockbuster signings many expected Beckham to attract, wasn’t very good. Inter is 19-31-8 so far. Its original head coach and sporting director, Diego Alonso and Paul McDonough, are already gone. The latter remains suspended by MLS following a 2021 investigation into Inter’s breach of league roster rules, which ultimately resulted in more than $2 million in fines and a steep cut to the club’s 2022-23 salary budget.
So much more was expected. And the discrepancy between possibility and reality was symbolized, in part, by color. Inter unveiled an eye-catching logo in 2018 that popped with pink, and early marketing materials leaned heavily into that uncommon sporting hue. The club draped the front page of the Miami Herald with a bright pink ad. It all seemed to set the stage for one of the most distinctive uniforms in sports, one that would reflect Miami’s unique setting, culture and glitz (not to mention its fashionable owner). Instead, there was MLS standard-issue black and white. It was all such a letdown.
