Will Lionel Messi's Inter Miami set a record in MLS?

What happens when you combine the 31st-best soccer league in the world with the best player ever, maybe the best striker of his generation, possibly the best holding midfielder of his generation and perhaps the best left back of his generation?

Total domination... right? Right?

After all, once Lionel Messi arrived at Inter Miami halfway through last season Miami seemingly and immediately went from the worst team in MLS to the best team in North America, en route to the Leagues Cup title. Soccer is supposed to be the ultimate team sport, but for at least a couple of months last summer, Messi proved that one player could single-handedly win game after game.

Of course, then it all just sort of fizzled away. Messi got hurt, Miami stopped winning games, and the club never really even came close to sniffing a playoff berth in a league where more than 60% of the teams qualify for the postseason.

After signing Uruguayan superstar Luis Suárez this winter, Miami now likely has the four best players in MLS. In fact, the ex-Barcelona quartet of Messi, Suárez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba might be the four best players to ever play in MLS. The club now has the highest ceiling of any MLS team in league history.

At the same time, Suárez is 37, Messi 36, Busquets 35 and Alba 34. And before the trio of Messi, Busquets and Alba joined midseason in 2023, this same club had the fewest points of any team in MLS.

Given the age of those stars, then, Inter Miami head into the 2024 season boasting a contradictory set of realities hidden within the same squad. This team has the potential to be the greatest team MLS has ever seen -- but there's also the possibility that Miami will land closer to the bottom of the table than the top.

So, what will Miami become at the end of the season, which starts on Feb. 22: the greatest MLS team ever, or the biggest disappointment MLS has ever seen?

What is Miami's ceiling with a full MLS season of Messi & Co.?

The record for points in a single MLS season is the 73 accrued by the New England Revolution team that won the Supporters' Shield in 2021. That averages out to 2.15 points per game and over a 38-game season, that would come out to about 82 points.

In the six seasons Messi, Suárez, Busquets and Alba played together at Barcelona, they won 94, 91, 90, 93, 87, and 82 points. That averages out to about 90 points per season, or 2.37 points per game. Across MLS' 34-game season, that average would add up to 81 points -- or a full eight points better than the current MLS record.

From an individual talent standpoint, that Revolution team had two standout players: goalkeeper Matt Turner and winger Tajon Buchanan. Turner eventually moved to Arsenal, where he spent a year as a backup before moving to become the starter at Nottingham Forest, where he has struggled this season. Buchanan moved to Club Brugge after the 2021 season. He played in 38% of the Belgian league minutes over three seasons before moving to Inter Milan during the most recent January transfer window. Outside of those two, Carles Gil, who spent a handful of seasons as a spot starter in LaLiga and the Premier League, was the only other Revolution player to grab a foothold at the highest level of the game.

However, despite setting the record for most regular-season points ever, the Revolution didn't win MLS Cup. In fact, only eight of the 28 Supporters' Shield winners have gone on to win the playoff trophy -- just 29%.

In terms of regular-season and playoff success, then, the best team in league history is probably the 2018 iteration of Atlanta United. They didn't win the Supporters' Shield for the best regular season, but their 69 points are tied for fourth-most in league history. And then they also advanced through playoffs and won MLS Cup. Toronto FC had won 69 points and the Supporters Shield' and MLS Cup the season before, but we're using Atlanta as the model because their underlying performance level was significantly better: plus-0.81 non-penalty expected goals, or xG, differential per game, compared with Toronto's plus-0.33.

That Atlanta side featured Brad Guzan, who started as a Premier League goalkeeper for five seasons; Miguel Almirón, who has mostly been a league-average-or-worse Premier League winger with Newcastle for six seasons; and Josef Martinez, who is one of the great strikers in MLS history, but who scored only seven goals in three seasons with Torino in Serie A.

The point is: Miami's top-end talent blows both of these teams out of the water -- even with the players at such advanced ages.

Messi is still one of the best players in the world, and his few months with Miami last season were already the best couple of months for any individual player in the history of soccer in North America.

Among players to feature in at least 900 minutes in an MLS season, Busquets was the only midfielder in the league to complete at least 6.5 progressive passes per 90 minutes and make at least five tackles+interceptions. Oh, and he still completed 89% of his passes.

Alba -- the target, for nearly a decade, of an unending barrage of diagonal balls from Messi and Busquets -- was the only player in the league to both receive at least 10 progressive passes per 90 minutes and complete at least six of his own.

As for Suárez, he's the oldest of the bunch, but he's also coming off of a season in which he won Brazilian Player of the Year while leading the league in total goals+assists and goals+assists per 90 minutes. In other words, he was pretty easily the best player in a league that's significantly better than MLS.

One final stumbling block here could be the manager, but Inter Miami's coach is Gerardo "Tata" Martino -- the same guy who coached Messi & Co. at Barcelona in 2013-14 and took Atlanta United to an MLS Cup in 2018.

What is Miami's floor in 2024, and how wrong can it go?

The point-total comparison I made at the beginning of the last section isn't quite fair for a couple of reasons.

The first: although the quality of play in LaLiga is way higher than it is in MLS, there's also a much more unequal distribution of talent. In MLS, there's basically an American-style salary cap, with a handful of seemingly made-up-on-the-fly exceptions. In LaLiga, there are spending limits but not any kind of financial restrictions designed to promote parity.

Last season, Inter Miami's league-high payroll was a little over three times as much as Orlando City's league-low payroll. Messi himself was making more than six separate MLS clubs pay their entire rosters. If that seems absurd, then get a load of Spain. In Messi's final season with Barcelona, the club's payroll, as estimated by data from the site FBRef, was 27 times the size of Elche's league-low number. Messi's personal salary was more than all but six teams in LaLiga's rosters.

The other reason the points aren't really a one-to-one comparison is that there are no playoffs in LaLiga and because of that, Barcelona is always trying to maximize its point total in every game it plays. Some players might get rested against an easier opponent or if the league gets wrapped up early, but the regular season is the playoffs for all intents and purposes.

That just won't be the case for Inter Miami this season. Messi, Alba and Busquets have all been remarkably durable over the course of their careers -- Suárez seemed to be slowing down in 2022, but then he played 84% of the available minutes for Gremio last season. It's just that there seems to be very little value in pushing all four of them to max out their minutes load in the regular season, and without these four on the field, Miami is clearly a worse team.

As mentioned earlier, winning the Supporters' Shield doesn't guarantee postseason success, either. And in the current MLS playoff structure, the top eight teams in each of the league's two conferences get a bye. There's not a massive competitive advantage to be gained by setting any kind of regular-season points record.

On top of that, as MLS' Matt Doyle pointed out, Miami is going to be playing a ton of games this season. They are currently on a seven-game globe-trotting preseason tour, they're in the Concacaf Champions League, they're in the Leagues Cup, they're also has the U.S. Open Cup, and they still have the MLS regular season. Oh, and that's all before you even get to the main attraction: the MLS Cup playoffs.

(While we're here: No, I don't put any stock in Miami's preseason struggles. In all of the other major American sports, research suggests there's very little correlation between preseason and regular-season performance. I don't see why it wouldn't be the same for MLS.)

Inter Miami is a top-heavy team: they added stars to a weak roster and immediately got good, but all of the stars are old. I'd imagine Miami will prioritize trying to win the Champions League at the beginning of the season -- only three MLS teams have ever done it -- and being healthy come the playoffs. It took 49 points last season to finish top seven in the Eastern Conference. Miami was well above that pace in the matches that Messi and/or Alba played in last season.

But there is also a small chance the bottom will fall out.

Busquets played the most minutes of the three stars last season in MLS, and over that stretch the team averaged only 1.36 points per game, which would've put it in eighth place in the East over a full season. Messi has started to struggle with injuries as he has aged deeper into his 30s. Alba, too. And Suárez has pretty openly talked about the pain he suffers on a daily basis. There's a chance one or more of them could miss significant parts of the season because their bodies aren't cooperating.

Miami did add Julian Gressel, a member of Martino's 2018 Atlanta team and the defending-champ Columbus Crew. Gressel has been a winning player for his entire professional career, but even he's in his 30s now.

Meanwhile, two of Miami's most promising young players are already hurt. Benjamin Cremaschi, an 18-year-old American midfielder, is expected to miss a few months after undergoing hernia surgery. And Facundo Farías, a 21-year-old attacker who was called up to the senior Argentine national team last fall, is expected to miss the whole season with a torn ACL. Those were two of the team's biggest candidates for internal improvement. Otherwise, the rest of the roster is mostly made up of the group of players that was terrible before Messi showed up.

Although there would be very real potential for a disastrous season for Miami within the competitive structure of European structure -- a couple of injuries and, boom, you've lost so many games you can't finish any higher than sixth -- it's really hard to see this team not at least making the playoffs even in the absolute worst-case scenario season where everyone gets injured and they all hit a performance cliff too. Last season, 1.26 points per game was enough to make the postseason. That's bottom-half-of-the-table form in any major European league.

As long as Miami makes the postseason and the team has Messi and at least one or two of Busquets, Alba and Suárez healthy, they are going to be the favorite to win it all. Unsurprisingly, Miami is the favorite to win it all right now, too. According to MLS, among the past 10 teams to win MLS Cup, the biggest preseason favorite was the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2014 at odds of plus-450. They were led by a 31-year-old Landon Donovan and a 33-year-old Robbie Keane -- two of the best players in league history and two players who never came close to hitting the levels where Messi, Busquets, Suárez and Alba spent most of their professional careers.

As such, ahead of that ex-Barcelona group's first full season together in MLS, Inter Miami are significantly bigger favorites to win it all than the Galaxy, who had also won two of the previous three titles. ESPN Bet puts Miami's title odds at plus-325.

Despite being all but guaranteed to qualify for the playoffs, despite more star power than the league has ever seen in one place, and despite being the biggest preseason favorite of the past decade, Inter Miami's implied odds of winning it all are still less than 25%. Such is the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of knockout soccer that even Lionel Messi, Sergio Busquets, Luis Suárez and Jordi Alba can't guarantee you a title.

The most likely outcome to this MLS season is that, come December, someone other than Miami will be lifting the championship trophy. And even though the odds say that's to be expected, with the caliber of players on Miami's roster, it would still be seen as perhaps the most disappointing finish in MLS history.