Major League Soccer could not present his most popular jewelry in his championship match.
Lionel Messi I did not play with the defenders in the MLS Cup final. He made none of these passes that no other player could do. He has not created any magic.
Messi did nothing about it because he was not there. His team, Inter Miami, was eliminated playoffs Four weeks ago.
Standing for Messi at the flagship event on the league on Saturday was The galaxy And New York Red Bulls.
None of the two teams spent as much this season as Inter Miami, who had a payroll of $ 40 million. Neither of the two teams had the inter Miami star power, especially after Galaxy Playmaker Riqui Puig was excluded from the game with a sustained torn anterior cross ligament in the Western Conference final.
What the galaxy and the Red Bulls provided was a more precise image of what MLS is today.
The MLS today is the galaxy, which has recovered its title of kings of the league with a 2-1 victory On the Red Bulls of Dignity Health Sports Park after having modernized their entire operation.
Today's MLS is the Red Bulls, who unusually depend on American players developed in their own young academy.
Messi and Inter Miami are part of this ecosystem. However, they will not be long. Whenever Messi, 37, retires or advances, teams such as the Galaxy and the Red Bulls will be what remains.
The Galaxy was a version at the level of what Inter Miami is now, building world renowned players at the back of their career. The approach has become less effective as the level of play in MLS has improved, which led them to change the way they built their list.
Instead of looking for the transfer market for one of the contemporaries of Messi, the galaxy has targeted some young wingers from Joseph Paintsil, 26, and Gabriel Pec, 23, from Brazil.
The two players were almost entirely unknown in the United States before this season, but they were not brought to be brilliant objects. They were brought to win matches. During the MLS Cup final, Paintsil scored on a ninth minute through the Ball of Gaston Brugman and Dejan Jveljic on a 13th minute solo race from the midfield.
PAINTSIL and PEC will almost certainly have a chance to move to Europe. Again, they could choose to do what Puig did.
Maya Yoshida, before, hoists the MLS cup after the galaxy, behind the podium, beat New York on Saturday at Dignity Sports Health Park.
(All J. Schaben / Los Angeles)
If the galaxy has caught up with the MLS elite teams by acquiring Paints and PEC, they took ahead of them by signing Puig to a contract extension this year.
Puig was an unusual MLS who signed that he was a young player who was already in a high -level European team. The Spaniard was only 22 years old when the galaxy acquired it from Barcelona.
The wait around the game was that Puig would return to Europe as soon as he won like a professional. It did not happen. Earlier this year, the Galaxy announced that it has signed Puig to an extension throughout the 2027 season.
Puig, who finished the regular season with 13 goals and 15 assists, could become the best player in the history of this league. Messi's stay in MLS will be brief. The other two players who dominated the League to a similar degree, Carlos Vela de Lafc and Sebastian Giovinco du Toronto FC, also had relatively short stays in MLS.
Puig could spend the overwhelming majority of his career here. He has already become a cult hero in these regions, the stadium brilliant in sincere cries of appreciation when he was shown on the video dashboard encouraging his team in the last minutes.
This might not have much meaning for the world of sport as a whole, but it counts for people who have thrilled Dignity Health Sports Park.
This league has its own culture developed, which explains why about 2,000 fans of Red Bulls have traveled from the New York region to watch this match or why Taylor Twellman, a score champion who has become odious, was hooked in the post-match ceremony as if he were the commissioner of the NFL Roger Goodell.
DIGNITY Health Sports Park provided an appropriate framework for the show. The oldest specific football stadium in the country which is still used, the place of 27,000 places has aged with elegance in the past 21 years.
The Galaxy Gabriel Pec striker, on the right, fights a Red Bulls player for the control of the ball in the MLS Cup final on Saturday.
(All J. Schaben / Los Angeles)
The stadium is not old enough to feel obsolete but is old enough to have acquired the character.
It was there that Landon Donovan and David Beckham played, where Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored this goal, where Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy made their last appearances in the World Cup. This story is now part of the place, and there is a certain feeling inside its doors. Saturday's match will add to that.
This does not mean that it was not a lost opportunity. It was.
Messi and his team smothered and MLS was deprived of his dream final. What the league presented instead was not for everyone, but it was for someone.
