Coming to America

 Indulge Major League Soccer if it thinks this week's big news is the biggest coming-to-America story since the Beatles graced our shores, or maybe the Pope if you want to get all sacrilegious about it.

I mean, come on. We are talking about Lionel Messi here.

Excuse me: LIONEL MESSI!!!

Coming to Miami! To MLS! And not to repeat ourselves, but ... to MLS!

This is the biggest coup for American professional soccer since Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia wound up in New York playing for the Cosmos, giving the fledgling North American Soccer League a proper boost out of the gate. Of course, the NASL didn't last, mainly because most Americans couldn't name another of its teams on  a bet. But for awhile, America loved soccer.

And then Pele retired and, well ...

Well. All these years later, now comes Lionel Messi.

He doesn't have the mystical presence of a Pele, but he's only been the best player in the world for awhile now, unless it was Cristiano Ronaldo. He just led Argentina to the World Cup at 35, and not all that long ago he was the star of one of the top sides in the world in Barcelona, and now he's coming to Miami.

OK, so technically he's coming to suburban Fort Lauderdale, where Messi's new team, Inter Miami, plays its games. But you get the idea.

Now, it's hard so say how much of a bump he'll give MLS as a whole. But he'll surely give one to Inter Miami, which just became the Cosmos of the MLS. At the very least, non-soccer America now will be able to locate that team on radar, and by extension its league.

I know. I'm fengin' some shui here (a fully licensed Blob pastime). And while I'm at it, I might as well feng some more.

See, if it's important to note that Messi's coming, it's also important to note why he's coming. It's largely because Barcelona screwed up his paperwork with LaLiga a couple of years ago, which forced Messi to go play for PSG in Paris for a couple of years. Now he finds he can't back to Barcelona like he thought he might, so ...

So: Next stop, MLS.

And if this sounds like America was something of an afterthought, well, you're hearing's pretty good. It's probably a stretch to say he views it as a nice place to wind down his career and make a little bank while he's at it. But it's not much of a stretch.

After all, he wouldn't be the first getting-up-there European star to see MLS as a sort of soccer retirement community. David Beckham, anyone?

"I had an offer from another European team, but I didn't even evaluate it because in Europe my idea was only to go to Barcelona," Messi told Diario Sport the other day. "I'm also at a point where I want to get out of the spotlight a bit ... it was time to go to the American league to experience football in a different way."

Feel free to interpret "a different way" however you wish. Because in the end, does it really matter?