Is Lionel Messi really good or are the defences Inter Miami play against really bad?
Maybe you thought about it during his first goal of the night, eight minutes into the game, when he ran onto a lofted pass over the top from Sergio Busquets and looked a little surprised to find that the nearest Atlanta United defender was several beach towns away.
Or maybe it occurred to you after his second, when he strolled across a vast expanse of empty Florida grasslands, slid the ball to an undefended team-mate and got it back in front of goal for a tap-in.
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Surely by the time he assisted Inter Miami’s fourth goal of the night, a hilariously easy counterattack in which he dribbled most of the way up the middle of the pitch without an opponent so much as gesturing in his general direction, you started to have your suspicions.
Is Lionel Messi really this good, you wondered, or are MLS defences this bad?
Let’s answer the last part first: yes, the defending was really bad. Atlanta’s structure was a mess, the marking was hopeless, the shot-stopping nonexistent. It happens. In particular, it happens a lot in MLS in late July, when the sweltering heat in cities like Fort Lauderdale sends goalscoring through the roof.
There are bigger structural reasons why MLS teams can’t seem to keep the ball out of their net. Ever since David Beckham joined the league in 2007, MLS Commissioner Don Garber has signed off on a series of increasingly convoluted rules that allow ambitious owners in this salary-capped league to invest more in their squad, but not in the way they might want to. It’s easy now to spend a lot of money on a few great players, which is useful for marketing, but hard to spread it around to a lot of pretty good players, which might be useful for playing better football.
The result of this enforced inequality is
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