From left, Inter Miami co-owner Jorge Mas, forward Lionel Messi and director of MARCA Juan Ignacio … More
TNS
In the end, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber had no choice but to suspend Inter Miami’s Lionel Messi and Jordi Alba for their next MLS match after neither failed to show up for the 2025 MLS All-Star Game, in accordance with a longstanding league rule meant to prevent gratuitous no-shows.
You can argue the event is silly and has outlived its usefulness. And you can certainly understand why Messi and Alba didn’t want to play in it given the 33 competitive fixtures Miami has already played.
But it’s one thing to help a glamour team skirt around the edges of overly complicated league roster rules on a technicality, as is the case in Miami’s signing of Rodrigo De Paul that also became official on Friday. It’s another to let that team steamroll one of the simplest editcs on the books while others begrudgingly went along.
Vancouver, which has played one more competitive fixture than Miami, sent both of its players who earned their All-Star privilege. Fellow FIFA Club World Cup participants LAFC and Seattle sent theirs as well. And while Messi playing every minute of Miami’s last 16 matches was a good reason for him to be worn out, it also made it impossible to claim the kind of injury hardship that would’ve provided a credible reason to miss out.
Messi might be “extremely upset,” as Miami co-owner Jorge Mas said during an impromptu press conference on Friday. But that would be nothing compared to the hell that might’ve been unleashed within other clubs had Garber acquiesced.
All-Star Game, But No All-Star Break
Even so, during an exercise that was probably meant mostly to appease his superstar’s feelings amid still-ongoing contract extension negotiations, Mas did make one very valid point: If MLS really wants its stars to treat the event seriously – or at least as seriously as, say America’s best baseball or basketball players – then it needs to treat scheduling just as seriously.
“There are six MLS games this evening, less than 48 hours after an All-Star Game,” Mas said, as reported by Tom Bogert of GiveMeSport. “That’s not right. That’s not right to the players.”
In Major League Baseball, a sport where the standard is to play a game nearly every day, the All-Star Game comes in the middle of a four-day break. In the National Basketball Association, in which the norm is to play three or four games a week, the All-Star festivities come while the league is otherwise dark for an entire week.
In MLS, where the standard is 1-2 games a week, the game only four days after most teams had already played three games in eight days, with another game to follow Friday or Saturday before steamrolling into 2025 Leagues Cup action.
This is a symptom of a more general issue with the MLS schedule: That the number of competitive matches keep increasing, while either the league or its club owners continue to resist playing more games in colder weather, perhaps because of concerns over ticket sales that are definitely stronger during summer months.
The true problem with the MLS schedule is not how many games it requires, but the fact that every guaranteed match for non-playoff teams comes between the end of February and the middle of October.
An All-Star Winter Is Coming?
The good news is that it appears MLS is nearing a calendar flip to a fall-to-spring model that will mirror European leagues. Even with a lengthy winter break, it’s a change that should ease some scheduling headaches.
And MLS should think about ways it can creatively eat some of those winter months with competitive fixtures that avoid the league’s coldest climates.
The Leagues Cup could be used for this purpose, were it staged sometime between December and February in warmer Southern U.S. locales exclusively. Perhaps that’s also when the MLS All-Star Game could live and breathe with sufficient time devoted to festivities without compromising competitive fixtures.
Or MLS could follow pro football’s example. The National Football League’s Pro Bowl was always staged after most of the season was completed. And now it exists as a skills competition only, a format MLS could easily mimmick to bring together it stars without forcing them into more risky 11-on-11 competition.
The league could also choose to nix its All-Star festivities entirely and probably not upset very many people, given that such events are losing relevance in other “more American” sports. Both the NBA and NHL have attempted numerous different formats to try and invigorate their events, with limited success. The NFL appears happy to let its Pro Bowl festivities take a back seat to Super Bowl hype.
Whatever the decision, the worst outcome would be keeping the status quo, where the event is neither treated like a priority nor eliminated. It’s the main reason why we’re still talking about this whole saga in the first place.
