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    Messi Was Already a Hit in Miami. Then He Stepped Onto the Field.

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    The impact of the soccer star, who scored a game-winning goal in his debut on Friday, has already been felt in the city known as the unofficial capital of Latin America.Since Lionel Messi announced in early June that he intended to make a stunning jump to Major League Soccer for the twilight of his career, he has flipped the world of his new team, Inter Miami, upside down and shined an enormous spotlight on South Florida. Considered perhaps the greatest soccer player of all time, Messi brought an unprecedented amount of attention to a team that was in only its fourth season and mired in last place.And when Messi was fouled near the top of the penalty box in the third minute of added time in his highly anticipated debut on Friday, he had a chance to prove once again why he was worth all of this hoopla, money and adulation. As he lined up for the free kick in the waning seconds of the game, the crowd of 20,512 at DRV PNK Stadium wondered if he could author another unforgettable moment in an already storied career.The answer: of course. With his golden left foot, Messi drilled a shot into the top left corner of the net, providing the winning difference in a 2-1 victory over Mexican team Cruz Azul that seemed surreal but also quite fitting.“A tremendous joy to get our first victory after how we’ve been doing in the league,” Messi said in Spanish in a postgame television interview.Teammate Kamal Miller said it best when he noted that it was “crazy how that the whole crowd expected the ball to go right there, and he put it right there.” He added later, “We all had that feeling that if anyone could pull off something of that magnitude, that’s the right man.”Fans stood outside DRV PNK Stadium on Sunday to celebrate Messi’s arrival.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThis is the power of Messi. Before he agreed to come here, Inter Miami was perhaps best known for a cheating scandal in 2021. And this season, Miami had not won since May 23, a span of 11 games. But Messi, 36, has already made an instant impact on and off the field.Messi, who led Argentina to World Cup glory in December and has claimed seven Ballons d’Or as the world’s best men’s soccer player, isn’t just an iconic athlete who has reached almost mythical proportions. He already has and likely will continue to have a substantial cultural influence on a city — and region — known as the unofficial capital of Latin America. Restaurants have changed their menus to include Messi-themed dishes. Murals and signs of Messi have popped up everywhere. Argentine culture is spreading through him.“The magnitude of this announcement — no matter how much I’ve prepared, envisioned, dreamed — is mind-blowing,” said Jorge Mas, the Cuban American billionaire and South Florida native who is the managing owner of Inter Miami. “You’d have to live in a cave to not know that Leo Messi is an Inter Miami player, no matter where in the world.”Look no further than the demand for tickets.A mural of Messi outside the Argentine restaurant Fiorito in Miami.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesGranted, Inter Miami plays in a stadium about 30 miles north of downtown Miami that has a listed capacity of 19,000 and is a placeholder until a proposed larger venue next to Miami International Airport is expected to be completed in two years.But the prices for many tickets to Messi’s first Inter Miami game jumped over $300 from roughly $40. As he acclimated to a new team, Messi didn’t start the game — part of a new monthlong tournament between M.L.S. and Liga MX called Leagues Cup — but it was a sellout anyway. From the beginning of the game, long before he stepped onto the field as a substitute in the 54th minute, fans had been chanting his name.The average ticket price on the secondary market for Inter Miami’s remaining home games skyrocketed to $850 from $152, with road games seeing an even bigger jump, according to Ticket IQ.While some fans have gotten their hands on a Messi Inter Miami jersey, the items are hard to come by online. A note on Inter Miami and M.L.S. official stores, which are run by the sports apparel retailer Fanatics, said that Adidas, the league’s official jersey supplier, would be “delivering this product in mid October.” The M.L.S. regular season ends around then. (Adidas did not respond to a request for comment.)According to Fanatics, since Messi’s new jersey launched on Monday, Inter Miami has been its top-selling team across all sports. The company said on Thursday that it had sold more Inter Miami merchandise since Monday than in the previous seven and a half months of 2023.“This is going to give a level of global exposure for us that we never could have achieved without a player like Messi,” M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber said. “Whether that’s in South America or in Argentina, or in Europe because he had legendary careers in Barcelona and in France. The goal is try to capture as much of the interest in Messi as we can.”Before Messi’s announcement, Inter Miami’s Instagram account had one million followers. The count had ballooned to nearly 11 million as of Friday, surpassing Inter Milan, the storied soccer club in Italy, and all professional sports teams in the United States save for three N.B.A. teams.Some businesses across South Florida now feature homages to Messi.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“The city has got a bit of a buzz to it now,” Inter Miami defender DeAndre Yedlin said to nearly 40 reporters gathered before a Thursday morning practice, a crowd much larger than usual. “People are really excited, which is nice to see.”For Messi’s presentation event on Sunday — which was broadcast globally in English and Spanish on Apple TV, M.L.S.’s first-year streaming partner — nearly 500 media members were credentialed, according to Inter Miami. And nearly 200 were approved for Messi’s first practice, with a news helicopter circling above since early that morning. Even though reporters were given access to only 15 minutes of the training session, which is common in the sport, television and radio reporters from Argentina broadcast live from their spots on the other side of the field, and then later from the parking lot.“That’s a gift that Leo has given the sport,” said David Beckham, the former soccer star and an Inter Miami owner. “It’s about legacy for him. He’s at the stage of his career where he’s done everything that any soccer player can do in the sport.”Even beyond the field, Messi is among the most famous humans on Earth. At the World Cup in Qatar, it was common to see not only Argentina fans wearing his jersey and singing the national team chants, but also people from Bangladesh or the Philippines. A 30-foot-tall cutout of Messi stands, for example, in the southern Indian state of Kerala.Building on its popularity in Asia, Argentina’s national soccer federation had already begun its plans to grow in the U.S. market a year and a half ago. Leandro Petersen, the A.F.A.’s chief commercial and marketing officer, said the federation has 30-year deals in place in South Florida either to build new facilities (North Bay Village) or to renovate existing ones (Hialeah) to use as training centers for its national team ahead of the 2024 Copa América tournament and the 2026 World Cup.Demand for Inter Miami gear and tickets have skyrocketed. Argentine culture is spreading through him in Miami.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesBut now that Messi is around, Petersen said the federation is benefiting from the boost and seeing its timelines accelerate. Before, he said, it was more difficult to compete with the established American sports leagues, such as the N.F.L. or N.B.A.“What’s happening now is that different companies that didn’t invest in soccer because it’s not the most popular sport in the United States, they’re now starting to include in their budget a part to invest in soccer,” Petersen said in Spanish. Emi Danieluk, the brand ambassador for a local chain of Argentine steakhouses called Baires Grill, which has frequently hosted Messi, his family and his Argentine teammates, said Messi’s arrival had already given more visibility to Argentine culture, products and food. He sees more potential ripple effects of Messi’s presence.“We have today an example of what Messi is generating in Florida, but I can assure you when he starts to travel for Inter Miami to other stadiums that have more capacity, like Atlanta United and 80,000 people, the impact he is going to have in every state is really significant,” Danieluk said. “I don’t think people realize that right now.”Messi walked triumphantly off the field after his first Inter Miami game.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose in attendance at Friday’s game saw Messi’s substantial impact. After he and Sergio Busquets, a fellow newcomer and former teammate of Messi’s in Barcelona, entered the game, they began exposing Cruz Azul’s defense. In stoppage time, Messi drew a foul and worked his magic. He sent the crowd into a frenzy, celebrated with teammates and raced over to hug his family.“We want to start like that, giving the victory to these people and to thank all the people here,” Messi said afterward, adding later, “I hope that we continue like this and they keep accompanying us all year.” More

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      Naomi Osaka Finds New Motivation Despite a Loss in Miami

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      A couple of years ago, Naomi Osaka told Iga Swiatek she was too good to quit tennis. On Saturday, Swiatek proved her right.MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — A little more than two years ago, over dinner during the Australian Open, Iga Swiatek told Naomi Osaka that she wasn’t sure a career in tennis was going to go her way, so she was thinking of going to college. Osaka, who was 22 then and had already won two Grand Slam titles, told Swiatek that was a terrible idea. You’re really good, Osaka told Swiatek, who at the time was still cramming in high school homework. Don’t divert your energy to college just yet, Osaka advised.Swiatek took Osaka’s advice, and good thing she did. Nine months later she came out of nowhere to win the French Open while she was ranked 54th in the world. Saturday, in a clash of styles, narratives and friends in the finals of the Miami Open, Swiatek ended a run that Osaka hopes will mark the beginning of the next chapter of her turbulent career with a 6-4, 6-0 win to cement her remarkable rise to the top of her sport.Next week, Swiatek will officially take over the No. 1 ranking, the first player from Poland to rise to that lofty perch. As she held the winner’s trophy, Swiatek called Osaka “an inspiration” and said she would never have imagined when they were having that dinner that they might actually be playing each other for championships one day.“I think it’s the start of a great rivalry,” Swiatek said.For Osaka, this tournament marked a remarkable turnaround that few saw coming, even if she felt like it was not far off. Just three weeks ago at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, a lone heckler rattled her during her second round match, bringing her to tears and triggering memories of the racist treatment Serena and Venus Williams endured at the event two decades ago.But it also seemed to suggest that Osaka, who lost 6-0, 6-4 to Veronika Kudermatova that night, might not be up for the grind and pressures of the professional tennis tour after a year filled with breaks and setbacks, a disclosure of a yearslong struggle with her mental health and questions about whether playing tennis could ever make her happy.In South Florida though, her home for most of her childhood, a far-steelier Osaka took the court, and she played a lot like she had when she won four Grand Slam tournaments. She won eight consecutive sets on the way to a semifinal match in which she battled back against an opponent, Belinda Bencic of Switzerland, who had beaten her repeatedly for years.Osaka was once more ripping forehands through the court and coming up with unreturnable laser serves when she needed them most. Beyond the tennis, though, there has been a lightness to her experience. Even in defeat Saturday, she could not help but grin as the hometown crowd smothered her with cheers.They were never louder than when James Blake, the former pro and the tournament director for this event, gazed at Osaka during the awards presentation and said, “I can’t tell you how good it makes me feel to see you happy again.”Then it was Osaka’s turn. “I know I haven’t been in this position for a little while,” she told the crowd after her first final since the 2021 Australian Open. “The outcome wasn’t what you wanted, but hopefully I can keep working hard and be in a position to do this again soon.”Swiatek entered Sunday’s final on a 16-game win streak.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockIn the past, she would say later, she would be crying with disappointment following a day like Saturday. Instead, she experienced it as “a sad outcome but a fun day. “It’s cool to see where the level of No. 1 is and to see if I can reach that,” she said.In Swiatek, Osaka ran into a version of a player that didn’t exist when Osaka was last a mainstay of important tournaments.With the sudden retirement of Ashleigh Barty last week, Swiatek earned the No. 1 ranking, owing largely to a white-hot start to the year. Since her loss in the semifinal of the Australian Open, Swiatek has won three masters-level titles, in Doha, Indian Wells, and Miami, events that are just below the Grand Slams.Saturday’s final riding a 16-match winning streak. But it is the manner in which she has managed all the winning that has her opponents leaving the court with a dazed and glazed look in their eyes.Gone is the shaky mind that used to rattle after a handful of lost points or games or a set. She has evolved into a ruthless problem solver who tears through opponents, especially in finals. She has seemingly gained a half-step — or maybe just a willingness to embrace the next level of fatigue — that allows her to extend points and force opponents to hit extra shots when they thought the point was over.She also is just about the only player in the world who can consistently pull off a kind of tennis magic trick when a ball comes rocketing across the net and lands inches from her feet. In a split second, Swiatek squats so low that her skirt is basically on the ground and fires a kind of swinging half-volley that allows her to go back on the attack. She seems to invent a new shot in every match these days. Saturday it was a back-spinning squash shot lob that landed within inches of the baseline.Osaka, who entered the tournament ranked 77th, had little to lose in the final. She had never lost the final of either a Grand Slam or a Masters 1000 tournament, but neither had Swiatek. Osaka positioned herself several steps into the court on Swiatek’s second serve, trying to rely on her quick hands and instinctive skill to punch the ball back and keep Swiatek off balance.The strategy never quite clicked. “I could never really figure out what to do,” Osaka said.Swiatek never faced a break point, and she had Osaka on the defensive from the start. It took Osaka 11 minutes to hold her serve in the first game. On the afternoon, she won nearly two-thirds of the points on her first serve, which hovered in the neighborhood of 120 m.p.h., but just one-third of those on her second, which was often in the mid-70s.Osaka’s next move will be closely watched. The clay court season in Europe is fast approaching. Clay has long been her worst surface. Grass is no picnic for her either. But she said she will travel to Europe later this month to prepare for the Madrid Open, and has an extra week of preparation built into her schedule. After months of questioning what she wanted from her tennis life, she desperately wants to do well, she said. She wants to be seeded for the French Open, which would likely mean being around the top 30. And she wants to be in the top 10 by the end of the year and reclaim the top ranking next year. “It feels kind of good to chase something,” she said. “That is a feeling I have been missing.” More

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      With Biggest Stars Absent, Miami Open Serves Up Some Chaos

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      Top men’s seeds and Naomi Osaka fell earlier than expected, but there was some normalcy: Ashleigh Barty won in women’s singles, successfully defending her title.MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — So what exactly happened at the Miami Open over the past two weeks?Other than the top-seeded Ashleigh Barty walking away with the women’s singles title, something like tennis chaos unfolded at the only significant tournament in North America until August.Where to begin? Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam event winner, lost a match for the first time in more than a year, and on a hardcourt, a surface it seemed she might never lose on again. After the men’s Big Three — Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic — skipped this tournament, Jannik Sinner of Italy and Hubert Hurkacz of Poland, close friends and doubles partners, dueled in their first ATP Masters 1000 final. Hurkacz blew past Sinner, a player experts have tapped to be an eventual No. 1, 7-6 (4), 6-4.Barty and Bianca Andreescu, who won Grand Slam events in 2019 but barely played in 2020, gave notice they were just about fully back as they met for the first time in the women’s singles final. A 20-year-old with top-class tennis DNA named Sebastian Korda, the son of the former world No. 2 Petr Korda, made the final eight and was the last remaining American.The top two men’s seeds, Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas, lost in the quarterfinals. Alexander Zverev, the No. 3 seed, lost in the second round after having a bye in the first. Andrey Rublev was the only player in the top 10 of the ATP Tour rankings to make the semifinals, where he lost to Hurkacz in straight sets.Simona Halep, the No. 3 women’s seed, and Sofia Kenin, the No. 4 seed, each won just a single match, and Maria Sakkari, the No. 23 seed, served a bagel to Osaka in the first set of her 6-0, 6-4 quarterfinal win.In short, Miami provided a glimpse of a tennis future that does not include Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Serena Williams, who withdrew from the event after oral surgery: a sport of surprise and entropy.“Everyone can win now,” Rublev said after his quarterfinal win over Korda. “It’s not about ranking.”Rublev was talking about the tournament’s final rounds, but he could have meant the sport. Djokovic and Nadal are still nearly indomitable at big events, but when they skip one, all bets are off. (Federer, 39, has played just one tournament since his two knee operations last year.)Bernard Tomic of Australia said earlier this year that there was not much difference between a player ranked 60 and one ranked 250. It sounded strange, but now seems prescient.Aslan Karatsev, a Russian qualifier, made the semifinals of the Australian Open. Juan Manuel and Francisco Cerundolo, two brothers from Argentina who are ranked outside the top 100, made the finals of tournaments in South America, with Juan Manuel winning a title. Lorenzo Musetti, 19, an Italian ranked 94th, knocked off two players in the top 16 at the Mexican Open.Musetti, though, is only the second-best 19-year-old Italian at the moment: Sinner, the son of a cook and waitress and a surprise semifinalist at the French Open last year, is staking his claim as one of the brightest young players in the game.“He has everything,” Roberto Bautista Agut, the veteran from Spain, said of Sinner after losing to him in three sets in the semifinals. “Big serve. Tall. Moves well. Very good groundstrokes. Mentally great, and he’s improving.”Sinner is 6 feet 2 inches with long arms and legs that make him seem taller, and he has that priceless ability to pivot from defense to offense from nearly anywhere on the court and when his opponent least expects it. On three occasions against Bautista Agut, it looked like Sinner was about to wither, especially when he was down a set and three break points at 3-3 in the second set. Instead, he knotted the game with two winners, including a risky, floating crosscourt backhand that nicked the outside of the line.“Every match has a story,” Sinner said after that win. Later, he said, “Sometimes a few points can decide a match.”Ashleigh Barty, above, played Bianca Andreescu for the first time on Saturday, and beat her in the Miami Open final when Andreescu retired in the second set.Lynne Sladky/Associated PressThe Miami Open was an opportunity to show on a big stage what tennis could eventually look like.“I knew when Novak, Rafa, Roger and Dominic Thiem said they were not going to play, some of the younger guys would have a chance to play really deep,” said Hurkacz, 24, a lanky, pigeon-toed big server who has won two tournaments this year.Hurkacz, who often trains in Florida, was seeded 26th here, but he beat players seeded second, fourth, sixth and 12th in five days. He came back from a set and a service break down to Tsitsipas on a brutally hot day in the quarterfinal; outslugged Rublev in a gutsy performance, on a cool night in the semifinal; then knocked off the game’s latest boy wonder on a bright and breezy Easter afternoon.Sinner served for the first set at 6-5, but Hurkacz broke him at love. Then a series of errors allowed Hurkacz to cruise through the tiebreaker. Hurkacz frustrated Sinner with a serve that kept kicking up above his eyes, and two early service breaks in the second set made the final result come fast.Before the match, Sinner had begged off anointing himself the next big thing in tennis, cautioning that a good 10 days in Miami guaranteed nothing. “The road is long,” he said. “I know that. My team knows that.”Barty, 24, and Andreescu, 20, also know that. The two young Grand Slam champions had never played head-to-head before Saturday’s final, though the showdown proved an anticlimax. Andreescu, who struggled to find her rhythm against Barty’s relentless groundstrokes, appeared to roll her foot and ankle while down, 2-0, in the second set and defaulted two games later, giving Barty her second consecutive Miami Open title, 6-3, 4-0.Barty, the world No. 1 from Australia, opted not to play when tennis returned last August, because of her country’s strict quarantine requirements for anyone returning home during the pandemic. She played little tennis in 2020 from March until October, when she began to prepare for the Australian summer of tennis. She kept her top ranking only because of a pandemic rule change that allowed players to maintain their points from 2019.She won a tuneup for the Australian Open, but lost in the quarterfinals of the Grand Slam event and in the first round of a tournament the next week. Barty has gained confidence. In Miami, she barely used the slices she tends to hit when she loses her edge. She does not plan to return to Australia until the fall so she can avoid the country’s mandatory two-week lockdown for international arrivals.“I knew eventually I would find it,” Barty said of her form and the patience with which she approached her return to the game. “I knew it might not be in the third week or the 10th week or the 20th week.”Andreescu, a Canadian, caught the injury bug shortly after winning the 2019 United States Open. It kept her from last year’s summer and fall events. In Australia, she showed flashes of her shotmaking prowess but was too inconsistent to play deep into events. In Miami, she prevailed in four three-set matches to make the final, surviving a third-set tiebreaker in the semifinal against Sakkari that finished past midnight. Then came another injury, a final twist in this strange tournament.She tried to play through the pain, but eventually gave in to her trainer, Abdul Sillah, who urged her from courtside not to risk further damage. “Abdul basically saved me from myself,” said Andreescu, who crouched and cried when she knew the end had come.With the Miami tournament over, the tours are planning to shift to the clay- and grass-court seasons in Europe, but events there are shrouded in uncertainty. Italy and France are in various stages of lockdowns as the European Union struggles to distribute the coronavirus vaccines. While organizers say the tournaments, the Italian Open and the French Open, which is the next Grand Slam event of the year, remain on track, it’s not clear whether government officials will allow them to take place.While Nadal and Djokovic will no doubt quickly attempt to restore order, Federer has yet to say how much clay-court tennis he will play. His focus, he has said, is being healthy for Wimbledon.Osaka, the winner of two of the last three Grand Slam events, has never won a tournament on those surfaces, leaving the door open for any number of her competitors to catch up to her.“I have more freedom on the clay and grass because I am still learning a lot,” Osaka said last week.In other words, expect more chaos. More