Lionel Messi is not supposed to still be this good. At 37, with more than two decades of professional football folded into his legs, the Argentine has reached an age when even the game's greatest players are managing decline, not erasing it. And yet here he is, performing at a level that continues to embarrass the actuarial tables of athletic aging.
The Athletic's assessment — that Messi remains, improbably, as good as ever — carries real weight for Inter Miami and for MLS at large. When Miami signed Messi in the summer of 2023, the implicit understanding was that the league was purchasing a monument, a marquee name to fill seats and sell jerseys before the curtain came down on a singular career. What it got instead was something far more disruptive: a player who has continued to operate near the peak of his powers, on a stage that increasingly feels too small for what he is doing on it.
For Inter Miami, the competitive implications are straightforward and profound. Messi is not window dressing. He is the engine. When he is healthy and engaged, Miami becomes a genuinely difficult team to defend against — a side with tactical sophistication above what most MLS rosters can produce. His presence elevates teammates, compresses defensive structures and creates the kind of decision-making problems that MLS backlines simply are not built to solve consistently.
The broader league implications are harder to quantify but impossible to ignore. MLS has spent years arguing that its product is more competitive, more tactically mature, more worthy of serious attention than its critics allow. Messi's continued excellence complicates that argument in an interesting way — his dominance suggests the league's ceiling remains well below what he represents, even at this stage of his career. That gap is both a marketing asset and an honest reckoning.
What makes the performance genuinely remarkable is the context. Messi has navigated injury interruptions, international tournament commitments with Argentina and the accumulated physical toll of a career that began before most of his current MLS opponents were teenagers. None of it has visibly diminished what he produces when he steps onto the field.
Miami's playoff positioning and Eastern Conference ambitions run directly through Messi's availability and form. The team is built around him in ways that no amount of roster depth can fully compensate for when he is absent. But when he plays — and plays like this — the conversation about Inter Miami shifts from curiosity to genuine contender.
The question hanging over the rest of this MLS season is not whether Messi can still do this. He has answered that already. The question is whether anyone in the league can build something capable of stopping him.