Jorge Mas, the man who brought Messi to MLS

Jorge Mas thumps his hand down on the desk in his corner office in Coral Gables, Florida. 

“If you will it, it will happen,” he says. 

Thump. 

“Will it.”

Thump. 

“Will it.”

Mas is talking about his family’s story. About how Church & Tower, a company his father built that started as “a couple guys in the back of a pick up truck digging ditches for a phone company,” grew into MasTec, a Fortune 400 company that did $9.8 billion in revenue in 2022.

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“I am a dreamer,” Mas says. “There’s always going to be obstacles, people pulling at you, pulling you down … but you will it. It may not be a straight path, but you will it.”

It’s this ethos that helped MasTec navigate through the telecom crash in 2000, Mas says, and that led him to buy into Inter Miami when David Beckham needed someone who could get a stadium deal over the line. It is also that exact willingness to push boundaries and push relentlessly forward that makes him somewhat of a polarizing figure in MLS ownership circles, winning over some with his ambition and alienating others for the rules violations for which Miami was hit with sanctions two years ago. 

Mas’s legacy in the league changed forever on June 7, however. He is now and forever the man who brought Lionel Messi to MLS.

On a Monday afternoon in mid-June, two weeks after Messi shocked the world with the announcement that he would continue his career in MLS, Mas agreed to sit down and discuss his journey to this point — how he thinks about leadership, his father’s impact on him and how he hopes to push the league forward.

From behind his desk, Mas looks directly at the downtown skyline of Miami. It’s a city the family company helped to rebuild after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992, taking