Tempting Lionel Messi to the United States could not solely be a matter of money. The money had to be right, of course. It had to be competitive. It was, Jorge Mas knew, perfectly possible that his attempt to persuade Messi, the greatest player of his generation, to sign for Inter Miami would fail because of money. But it would not succeed because of it. Not exclusively, anyway.
Nor, really, could Mas rely entirely on the other selling point he had identified as a possible advantage. Miami would appeal to Messi’s family, that was true. He and his wife, Antonella, already owned property there. His sons liked it. There was a strong, proud Argentine community in South Florida that could provide him with the maté and the facturas and the asado he required.
And while Miami could not offer Messi complete anonymity — he would still be mobbed when he went to the grocery store — it could offer him a version of normalcy in which it was theoretically possible for him to go to the grocery store in the first place. That, Mas was sure, would be appealing, but it could not be the whole appeal.
Instead, over the yearslong span of his courtship of Messi — Mas has said that he first hatched the idea in 2019, and has spent no little time since manifesting it into being — he chose to…
