The CONCACAF Champions Cup is far from the most glamorous soccer competition. But for Lionel Messi, in his first full year at Inter Miami, it’s probably the most significant. And on Thursday night, it dealt Messi and friends their first real blows of 2024. After 46 minutes, it had them in a giant hole, down 2-0 in Nashville.
But Messi and Luis Suarez lifted Inter up and out of that hole, to a dramatic 2-2 draw in this Round of 16 first leg.
Messi did so with one devastating sweep of his left boot.
Suarez followed with a stoppage-time header, a second all-important away goal, which will send Inter back to South Florida as the clear favorite in next week’s second leg.
The home-and-home series will be decided on aggregate, over 180 minutes. But Nashville, an emerging Messi nemesis, needed only four minutes to put a scare into Major League Soccer’s glamor club.
The hosts stunned Miami before the tournament’s significance could even be explored, before Messi even broke a sweat. They sliced through a new-look Inter midfield. Shaq Moore teed up Jacob Shaffelburg for an emphatic finish.
For most of the first half, they also stuffed Messi. And less than a minute into the second, Shaffelburg, a mulleted Canadian winger, stuffed Miami deeper into the hole.
He tip-toed inside on his right foot, and picked out the top corner.
So here Inter Miami was, in a yellow cauldron of noise, staring down defeat in the one competition where it can’t afford one.
The Champions Cup isn’t just a battle for regional supremacy, à la the UEFA Champions League. The 2024 edition offers one last ticket to the inaugural 32-team Club World Cup, which is coming to the United States next summer, and in which Inter Miami desperately wants a spot.
Its grandest global ambitions, in many ways, depend on that 2025 tournament. It will feature Real Madrid and Manchester City, Bayern Munich and PSG, plus the best of Brazil, Japan and Saudi Arabia. It is Inter’s gateway to soccer’s top table. It is also the only Club World Cup that will occur with Messi under contract.
So the route to it is seemingly Miami’s 2024 priority. They will, of course, try to repeat as Leagues Cup champs; and they know they must make the MLS playoffs. But those are distant concerns. Their pressing concern is what head coach Tata Martino recently called “the great challenge that is…