Messi calling Major League Soccer ‘minor’ might have been a mistake, but maybe not

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Back when life was simple, Lionel Messi played soccer and went home. That’s it.

By North American standards, top European pros are almost never interviewed, and Messi far less than most.

He was too pristine a talent to disturb with the roughhousing of regular back and forths. For years, you could consider yourself a great admirer of the player and yet be unfamiliar with the sound of his voice.

Now that he’s moved to America to become the world’s tiniest billion-dollar corporation, Messi is expected to speak more. And not just about last night’s game. Through his partnership with Apple, he’s in the documentary business.

Messi’s no great orator, but he has one salutary habit – he says what he’s thinking. Maybe that’s inexperience. Maybe it’s having been raised in one of the last places where the art of conversation isn’t bludgeoned out of you in childhood.

In one of many off-season interviews, at home in Argentina, Messi got to musing about the past year.

“I said it several times and it is a reality – I will always try to compete to the maximum and I am the first to know when I can be there and when I can’t,” he said, according to a translation by Reuters. “I am also aware that I went to a minor league, but a lot happens because of the way one faces it and competes.”

Compared with the places Messi’s been, Major League Soccer is minor-league soccer. This is an indisputable truth. But it’s not polite to say it.

A good rule for athletes speaking in public is to imagine themselves sitting with friends, having a couple of pops, trading stories. Anything you would say in that milieu is everything you should not say in front of a microphone. Say the opposite of that.

‘I hated his guts’ becomes ‘incredible competitor.’ ‘Complete idiot’ becomes ‘does not know how to lose.’ Like so.

Messi’s slip – if that’s what it was – made news all over. Some tabs wanted to turn it into a scandal. But that word suggests a mistake has been made and that there will be consequences for it.

What consequences can MLS visit on Messi? It will take his face off the billboards and replace him with who exactly? It will stop doubling the prices to games Messi plays in, at home and on the road?

And what if it wasn’t a slip? What if this was Messi reminding everyone who’s in charge? He can take the field in a tank top and flip flops and all MLS can do is make sure it has Messi flip flops for sale at the online store by halftime.

He doesn’t just play in its dinky league. Messi’s the de facto commissioner of it. The day he leaves is the day this whole operation goes back to being fourth-rate. Until then, Messi can say what he likes.

This is a whole new level of power for a pro athlete. You don’t just front the league – you run it. And after you, the deluge.

Messi had the opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia for even more money. But he ceded that territory to his great rival, Cristiano Ronaldo.

There was something very Octavian and Marc Antony dividing up the known world about it. You take that soccer backwater and I’ll take this one and we’ll both have our fiefdoms.

Ronaldo exercises a power akin to Messi’s in the kingdom, but quietly.

The Portuguese star used to love a cheeky interview. He seemed to draw immense pleasure out of antagonizing his employers. As his powers diminished, so did the returns on that strategy.

In Saudi Arabia – a league even more minor than MLS – Ronaldo’s job isn’t winning games or making news. It’s being seen. He is a human avatar of progress – whether or not any progress is made. All you have to say is ‘Ten years ago, would a Ronaldo be here? No. So there you go. We’re coming up in the world.’

Now that Saudi Arabia looks set to hold the 2034 World Cup, Ronaldo has potential value for all the years in between. In a league this mediocre, it’s possible he can remain a viable presence well into his middle 40s.

All of a sudden, this is the new possible career path for a few very exceptional performers.

You spend your teens building up your name recognition. In your 20s, you seek out the best competition available and dominate. In your 30s you retire to some warm place where you’re paid 10 times what your play is worth in order to sell whatever those people happen to be selling. Politics is the most lucrative.

Spurred by Ronaldo’s example, LeBron James is publicly toying with the idea. A few months ago, he joked about signing a one-year deal to play in the Saudi Basketball League – a league so thin on talent that you hesitate to put caps on it. The number getting tossed around in the press was US$1-billion for one year. A week later, James was seen in Saudi Arabia.

We used to think of playing professional sports as a vocation. It destroyed your body in return for a few years’ worth of high-status employment. Then you had to figure out something else to do with the rest of your life, knowing that nothing would give you anything close to the same juice. Fewer than you think make it out of that process intact.

Now a pro career has the potential of a startup. You’ve got 10 years to grow your business from scratch. If you plan and execute right, it may continue to pay off for the rest of your life. If you do it really right, it can turn your family into a dynasty. The Messis and Jameses could be the 21st century’s Carnegies and Rockefellers.

When you’re thinking on that scale, in a timeline of decades rather than years, who cares if the league is major, minor or anywhere in between? What matters is that you have control, and that everyone knows it.