Forty-two million dollars can buy a lot of things, but apparently it can’t buy an MLS championship, because for the second time in as many seasons Inter Miami came up short in trying to spend its way to a league title.
This time it was Atlanta United, the lowest seed in the 18-team playoff field, a team that has played the last five months with an interim coach and one with a payroll less than half the size of Miami’s, who delivered the fatal blow, beating Lionel Messi’s team Saturday in the deciding game of a best-of-three, first-round playoff series.
That has wrecked the plans of MLS — which has all but rechristened itself Messi Soccer League — and its broadcast partners at Apple, who both were deeply invested in drawing a massive global audience for a league championship game with Messi at its center.
Cinderella, however, ruined the coronation by proving mentality is still more valuable than money, grit can still beat greed and the magic of pixie dust should never be underestimated.
“Grinding, man. Grinding. Believing. Resilient,” Atlanta’s ageless goalkeeper Brad Guzan, who stopped nine shots in the 3-2 win, said of his team’s performance. “There’s some fairy dust in our locker room.”
Guzan and his teammates weren’t the only ones celebrating because Miami’s loss opened a wide path for the MLS Cup to return to Southern California for the second time in three years. LAFC and the Galaxy are the highest remaining seeds in the playoff tournament, meaning if both win their Western Conference semifinals in two weeks, the title game will definitely be played here no matter who wins the conference final.
Read more: LAFC keeps its poise in advancing to conference semifinals
There’s also an upside to the upset for MLS.
The league’s overarching philosophy since its founding has been parity, a goal its byzantine salary rules were designed to support. And Miami’s loss — to a team whose salary is 35% of its payroll — means the best-paid team won’t win the MLS Cup for the seventh straight year and the 12th time in 13 seasons.
According to figures compiled by the Spotrac website, the last time the league’s highest-salaried team was also its best-performing one was in 2017, when Toronto won the only treble…