Lionel Messi in MLS Cup could mark the league’s Caitlin Clark must-see-TV moment

Not since Lionel Messi stood over the ball 10 minutes past 10 p.m. local time on July 21, 2023, has Major League Soccer had the chance to seize an audience like the one possible on Saturday afternoon for MLS Cup.

Messi, in his first outing wearing pink. delivered in Fort Lauderdale that day. He famously curled his free kick into the upper corner to down Liga MX’s Cruz Azul in the Leagues Cup, a goal that captivated the sporting world. The way the Argentine immediately pulled the league into the global spotlight made the possibility of Messi in MLS feel seismic. And in many ways, he has has delivered on that promise.

Messi’s time in MLS so far has been an unequivocal commercial success. He has rewritten what is possible for a player here. His pink No. 10 shirt became the top-selling jersey in the world. Inter Miami’s valuation shot past $1 billion. He sold out stadiums across North America.

But for as successful as Messi has been in Miami, the league hasn’t been able to fully capitalize on his popularity, because the vast majority of his games have been played behind a paywall on Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass service. Messi undoubtedly sold more subscriptions, but reaching the wider American audience has proven difficult.

That’s why this MLS Cup may be the most important in league history.

With MLS Cup airing on Fox, MLS has its chance at a Caitlin Clark moment. Messi has played just a handful of games that have aired outside the Apple paywall. Now, he’ll chase his first MLS championship on over-the-air television, with the Vancouver Whitecaps and German great Thomas Müller hoping to play spoiler.

Considering the recent news of MLS’s restructured deal with Apple, which now expires three and a half years earlier than expected (in the summer of 2029 rather than the end of 2032), the pressure for MLS to show it can deliver viewers is enormous.

The league needs to prove it can command meaningful viewership. If Messi chasing MLS Cup against a Bayern Munich legend like Müller isn’t enough — what will be?

There has been no athlete perhaps since Tiger Woods that has delivered television audiences the way Clark has for women’s basketball. When Iowa played in the NCAA women’s championship game in 2024, it drew 18.9 million viewers, the most in history and a number that bested the men’s game by four million viewers. The Final Four and Elite Eight games also drew more than 10 million viewers.

Her first season in the WNBA set records for average viewership (1.2 million on ESPN), up 170 percent from the previous year. Those numbers helped to drive new and important revenue for the WNBA. And the audience stuck around. In 2025, with Clark playing in just 13 games, ESPN delivered its most-watched season ever, averaging 1.3 million viewers.

Clark’s ability to help bring in news fans — and the compelling WNBA product that compelled those fans to stick around — are the business model that MLS hopes to replicate.

With hindsight it’s easy to say that the drawbacks of the Apple deal were especially ill-timed considering Messi’s arrival. Apple was far and away the best offer on the table for MLS, but one can easily imagine what it might have looked like had MLS taken a less-lucrative, short-term deal with ESPN, Fox and Univision through the 2026 World Cup. Messi might have delivered Clark-type numbers in 2023 and 2024. Maybe that would have changed the equation for MLS, which needs bigger TV numbers to demand the sort of business-changing revenue it is seeking.

After playing in the Concacaf Champions Cup semifinals, Inter Miami and Vancouver will meet to decide MLS’s 2025 champion (Sam Navarro / Imagn Images)

The league knows it needs to spend more to compete globally, and media revenue is the lifeblood of that increased spending. Instead, it has been behind a paywall, and building an audience has proven more difficult. Last year’s MLS Cup is the best example of those issues.

The 2024 title game, facing off directly against college football’s SEC Championship game, saw a 47 percent drop in audience, averaging just 468,000 viewers on Fox and Fox Deportes. The league drew 890,000 in 2023 and a combined 2.155 million across Fox and Univision in 2022, the final year of the previous media deal.

The 2025 MLS Cup’s 2:30 p.m. kickoff time means Messi vs. Müller will avoid that disastrous head-to-head showdown with this year’s SEC Championship game. Alabama-Georgia kicks off at 4 p.m., a little bit before the final whistle should be sounding in Fort Lauderdale.

Messi will have a chance to bring in new viewers for a final that should be a compelling game. The Whitecaps are one of the best stories in MLS this year. Their Western Conference semifinal against LAFC was one of the best games of the season. A dominant win over San Diego FC in the Western Conference final sets up what should be an entertaining MLS Cup rich with subplots – and a rematch of a two-legged Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal from the spring that Vancouver dominated 5-1 on aggregate.

Miami is playing its best soccer and Messi is producing as much as ever. He has 27 goals and 22 assists over his last 24 games across all competitions with Inter Miami, including six goals and seven assists in six playoff games.

A win will cement the legacy of Messi’s on-field impact in MLS, and a big TV audience will reinforce his off-field effect. What MLS owners do with all of it will determine whether it’s a lasting influence – or just a fleeting moment.