How can Mascherano and Inter Miami salvage the 2025 season? | OneFootball

Reality Check: Messi and his 'Super Friends' are merely mortal

It all looked so easy a year ago. Lionel Messi had arrived in 2023 in time to help Inter Miami win its first major trophy, the Leagues Cup. The Herons lost the U.S. Open Cup final to Houston, but with former Barcelona teammates Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets already in South Florida and Luis Suarez arriving before the 2024 season, the Pink & Black seemed poised for greatness.

They settled for very goodness. The Herons led the league with 79 goals and won the Supporters Shield with a Major League Soccer record 74 regular-season points. But they didn't play for a trophy, losing to Monterey in the Champions Cup and suffering an embarrassing upset loss to Atlanta United in the first round of the MLS Cup playoffs.

It wasn't good enough for the Herons' ambitious ownership. Coach Tata Martino and sporting director Chris Henderson, both highly respected soccer minds, left the team. Their replacements? First-year club head coach Javier Mascherano, a friend and former teammate of Messi's, and veteran soccer personnel man Guillermo Hoyos, a mentor to Messi since he was a teenager at Barcelona.

Make no mistake, this is Lionel Messi's team, and if he wants his friends, people he likes and trusts, to be at Inter Miami, ownership is going to do what it can to bring those people to Miami. The club has a strong Argentinian and stronger Latin American character, and there's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is continuing to ignore the red flags of the past month; the Herons have lost five of its last seven matches and been outscored 20-12 during that stretch. Frustration is bubbling up among fans, players and, presumably, management.

MLS has figured out how to beat Inter Miami:

1. Mascherano's offensive strategy has one aim: Get the ball to Messi at the top of the box. He will shoot, drive, or pass to Suarez and cut to the net. It isn't difficult to deny Messi the ball and clog the spaces in which he and Suarez love to work. Out of deference to Messi, or inability to recognize and execute at his level, the other attackers hang on the perimeter of the box where they kick the ball around or back, building impressive possession percentages and no threat to opposing goalkeepers.

2. The Herons are excruciatingly slow. With Messi & Co. on the field, Inter Miami lacks the pace to press effectively or recover when teams play direct. Only Alba, the youngest of the quartet at 36, has any resemblance of pace. Defense is often an afterthought for Messi and Suarez, and Busquets, still a respectable defender, can't run like he once could. Most of the 20 goals Inter Miami has allowed in the last seven matches have been virtually identical, a long ball played over the midfield and chased down by a fast attacker who scores or passes to a runner who scores.

3. Finally, opponents know they can win if they can weather Las Garzas' initial surge. Former Heron midfielder Julian Gressel, a Tata Martino favorite who fell out of favor with Mascherano and was picked up by Minnesota United after being released by Miami earlier this season, told his new teammates that Inter Miami plays very well for 30 minutes, but become less dangerous and more vulnerable later in the match. The Loons scored their first goal of a 4-1 victory over the Herons in the 32nd minute. Is it fitness? Is it a lack of ideas? Failure by Mascherano to make timely adjustments? It's probably a little of each; I don't believe the players quit.

That's it. That's the scouting report on Inter Miami, and those are the weaknesses teams are exploiting. And those are the weaknesses that will see Inter Miami embarrassed on the global stage next month at the Club World Cup if Mascherano and management can't change the narrative.