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Kyle Bonagura, ESPN Staff Writer
About 20 minutes before a nearly finalized version of the 2024 Major League Soccer schedule was set to be distributed to club executives Sunday night, Vancouver Whitecaps president Axel Schuster received a message from the league office.
“Just a heads-up,” he was told. “You have the game.”
It was a possibility, Schuster knew, but until he had confirmation that Inter Miami was coming to Vancouver — and with that, the assumption that Lionel Messi was, too — he had refused to get his hopes up. “Until that point, there was no confidence,” Schuster told ESPN. “There was no clear message that it was going to be in Vancouver. We were never betting on it. We were just waiting.”
Now, after setting the club record for attendance with 30,204 at B.C. Place in a first-round playoff game against LAFC last year, the Whitecaps can almost surely count on a capacity crowd of 55,000 when Miami comes to town on May 25.
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For teams in the Western Conference, a home game against Inter Miami is akin to a winning lottery ticket. While teams in the East know they’ll have at least one home game each season against Miami that can be used to market the club, sell season tickets and offer multigame packages, the direct benefit for those in the West is not guaranteed. In the scheduling rotation with the league at 29 teams, Eastern Conference teams play just three of the West’s 14 teams on the road each season, meaning Messi’s North American tour almost surely won’t reach multiple interconference stops before his time in the league is over.
That’s why Schuster wasn’t banking on anything, even if it might have seemed as if Vancouver was due for some good fortune just two years removed from a 539-day stretch without a home game at B.C. Place due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Still, there was more reason to be optimistic. Since Inter Miami began play in 2020, Vancouver is one of three teams it has never played, along with Colorado and Real Salt Lake. Three others, Sporting Kansas City, Minnesota United and the Los Angeles Galaxy, have never hosted Miami. Given the history, those were the clubs that figured to have the best chance at seeing Miami at home when the schedule was released this week, especially after MLS commissioner Don Garber expressed two weeks ago that Messi games would not be gifted outside of the normal procedure.
“What we’ll try to do is have logic to that as opposed to picking those games that everyone thinks that are just going to grow the popularity and audience around those particular away matches,” Garber said. “We don’t think that’s fair. We think we need to have some rationale to that.”
Wednesday’s schedule release stayed true to that. In addition to Vancouver, Kansas City and the Galaxy also will host Miami this season, with the Galaxy game happening in an exclusive window on Sunday, Feb. 25, as part of opening weekend. Miami will host Salt Lake four days earlier to kick off MLS’ 29th season.
Last season, Messi’s arrival provided several teams unexpected boosts in ticket sales and gained global attention for the league. With time to execute more comprehensive marketing and ticket plans this year, the benefits are expected to be much greater. The trick for clubs, though, will be how to leverage Messi’s stint in the league for long-term dividends.
As one club executive put it, “Our job isn’t to showcase Messi to our fans. Our job is to showcase our club and our experience so when people come out to see him, they’ll want to come back when he’s not around.”
Ask around MLS and many will tell you that Brad Pursel has one of the most unenviable jobs in the league. Officially, he’s the senior vice president for game schedule management. Unofficially, he’s the scheduling guru. Pursel has been with MLS since 1997 and is the person responsible for piecing together one of the most complicated schedules in North American professional sports.
The process starts at least a year in advance and considers factors such as competitive equity, travel, weather, stadium availability, team requests or preferences, multiple competitions, player fatigue, FIFA international breaks, media partner input, priority time slots for big games, and so on. Once Pursel gathers all the relevant information from the clubs — usually by late summer — he gets to work.
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In the early days, that meant doing things manually, but for the past two decades or so, he has relied heavily on a customized proprietary scheduling software system. Using this software, Pursel can input various factors to consider before it spits back a schedule. “It helps optimize and maximize the best outcome for a schedule, and it’s based on a scoring point system,” Pursel said. “As you put penalties or constraints in, you try to come up with the best possible score for an overall schedule and a fair balance for each individual team’s schedule.
“It’s the same schedule software system that the NFL, and Major League Baseball, uses. I believe I was the first to use it in North America some maybe 20 years ago. It just keeps getting refined and updated and faster, stronger. It is a necessary piece to the puzzle.”
Even with advanced technology on his side, the work can be tedious. “You probably go through thousands of different schedule versions as the system runs and you’re refining it, pulling some levers here and there to try to get the best possible schedule,” Pursel said. “And then there’s a heavy manual review process when you get to a schedule that you think feels good based on the score that it’s spitting out.”
From there, a team of people at the league review the overall schedule and individual team schedules, trying to identify flaws or ways to improve. “If it’s something we think we can improve upon, either overall or with some individual teams, then we’ll go back to the drawing board, and we’ll probably do that at least a dozen times,” Pursel said.
This year, Messi’s presence came with the promise of additional scrutiny. Internally from clubs, externally from fans, and, of course, from the league’s media partner, Apple, which is set to begin its second year distributing the league’s broadcasts globally.
For the Western Conference teams, it was a matter of which three would get to host. In the East, it was when they would get to host, which matters because MLS often plays during international windows and will not go on hiatus during this summer’s Copa America in the United States.
After leading Argentina to a World Cup title in 2022, Messi is expected to continue playing a vital role for his country. He could miss as many as seven league games — four on the road — due to Copa America obligations (June 20-July 14). By design, all four of those road games are against teams in the East that hosted games Messi played in during the 2023 season: Philadelphia, Nashville, Charlotte and Cincinnati (U.S. Open Cup). Additionally, Miami will play at the New York Red Bulls, which also hosted Messi last season, during the March FIFA window, and Argentina has yet to schedule a game in March.
“Every team wants to host a Messi game. Who wouldn’t?” Pursel said. “But we wanted to do it in a fair manner and try to base it mostly on the competition side.”
When news broke last summer that Messi was coming to MLS, the possibility of hosting Messi in 2024 immediately became a topic of conversation inside the Galaxy front office.
“We played Miami at their house, but we never played them at ours,” Galaxy president Tom Braun told ESPN. “So, I think the expectation on our end was we should have a good chance to host Miami because we’d never hosted them before.”
Even if the Galaxy had hosted Miami in a prior season, it would have been easy to understand a bit of rule-bending to make this game possible, given the David Beckham-sized link between the clubs.
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In 2007, when Beckham signed with the Galaxy as the league’s first designated player, his contract included an option to purchase the rights to an expansion team for $25 million. He exercised the option in 2014, when he announced his intent to launch a Miami-based club that would become Inter Miami. It’s only fitting, then, that Beckham’s club would return to the stadium he used to call home with the player, Messi, who has surpassed him as the most consequential signing in league history.
“Ever since the signing of Messi in Miami, we’ve definitely had a lot of conversations with the league in the hopes that our name would be called to be able to host them here for our fans and for our league to really create something special,” Braun said.
The club’s pitch to the league was for Inter Miami to visit Southern California on opening weekend as a way to amplify the start of the season. Conversations took place during September and October, but it wasn’t until November, Braun said, that he started to get the impression it might be possible. “We had an understanding with the league that, probably in the last couple of weeks, that it was happening,” Braun said. “But it felt good when we received the schedule on Sunday night.”
There is a running joke around the league that executives on the business side couldn’t be happier to have Messi come to town while the head coaches might not share that same enthusiasm. Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes doesn’t fit the stereotype.
“In my opinion, he’s the best player in the world,” Vermes said. “I think Messi’s the best player of all time, and so the fact that he’ll be here in Kansas City will be tremendous.
“I know people traveled from Europe to come over and watch Michael Jordan play a game when he played for the Chicago Bulls, just because they knew it was something special and he was the best basketball player ever to play. This is the same type of thing.”
While the Galaxy have decided against taking the game to a larger venue, Vermes said he was open to the club hosting Inter Miami at nearby Arrowhead Stadium, the 76,416-capacity home of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Arrowhead served as SKC’s first stadium from the league’s first year in 1996 through 2007, when they were known as the Kansas City Wizards. They last played there in 2010, drawing over 50,000 for a friendly against Manchester United.
“That would be a rerun for me because I’ve played a lot of games in there myself over the years,” Vermes said. “But yeah, if there’s an opportunity for us to do that, that would be great.”
The concept of playing select games at larger venues is something that has worked well for the San Jose Earthquakes in recent years. Last season, they hosted the Galaxy at Stanford Stadium, drawing 43,000 fans, and LAFC at Levi’s Stadium, the home of the San Francisco 49ers, drawing 45,000. With those two games, the Quakes’ average attendance at the end of the year (18,412) was more than the capacity of their home stadium, PayPal Park (18,000). The game at Levi’s was so well-received, Earthquakes president Jared Shawlee said, that the team plans to open up the stadium’s upper decks this year when it hosts LAFC again and expects to sell out the 67,000-seat stadium.
Shawlee told ESPN he has had multiple calls with other league executives about the strategy, but so far no teams have stated an intention to move their Messi game to a larger venue. That could of course change in the coming weeks now that each club knows when it will host Miami.
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For weeks, several teams in the Eastern Conference have been selling ticket packages that include a set number of games, including the one against Miami. These are not necessarily being marketed as the chance to see Messi specifically, only the Inter Miami team.
Seeing Messi is implied, but teams are wary that if they lean too heavily on his presence, they could set themselves up for severe backlash if he doesn’t play for any number of reasons. This was especially true before the schedule was released, but even without announced dates, the Miami packages were popular. In New England, the Revolution have offered four- and six-games packages with and without Miami.
“That was to ensure that all of our fans that bought these packages and want to buy them again, can have the best affordable option to come to games going forward,” Revolution president Brian Bilello told ESPN. “If they want to come in 2024 and they don’t really care about coming to the Miami game, they can still get the same package at essentially the same price that they’ve always paid. Obviously, knowing there would be a lot of demand for the Miami match also we wanted to make sure that was available in a package.”
The four-game packages range $128-$348 per seat without Miami and $242-$580 per seat with Miami. “We’ve had a lot of success with those packages,” Bilello said. “As a data point, over 98% of the fans are buying the package with the Miami game.”
The packages have also sold at roughly 4-5 times the rate that previous Revolution ticket packages sold at, Bilello said.
Messi is the outsized factor there, but this also comes after the Revs set records for ticket sales in 2022 and again in 2023. They are a lock to break that record again this year based on tickets already sold and expect to have an increase of season-ticket membership by about 40% in 2024. “We’ve got over 60,000 seats available, so I don’t think a lot of people are buying season memberships specifically to see that Miami game,” Bilello said. “We have [the ticket packages for that]. … We’re pretty confident that the people who are buying the season memberships are more part of our natural growth curve.”
That’s the kind of trend all teams are aspiring for. Messi’s presence has already had a demonstrable short-term impact on ticket sales; the challenge then is converting those patrons into regular fans.