The former football star david beckhamone of the owners of Inter Miami, opened up to The Athletic in a long interview where he recounted a series of details regarding the hiring of Lionel Messi.
The Spice Boy stated that when he received the phone call confirming that Messi would wear pink, he had “the same feeling as when I left Old Trafford or Wembley. I thought: We just beat all the competition to sign the best player to ever play our game.”
The day Messi made the announcement Before his final decision, Beckham was in Japan, he said.
“I was with the family and I woke up at five in the morning because my phone wouldn’t stop vibrating. My wife (former Spice Girls pop star Victoria) said to me, ‘Turn off your phone!’ I look at my phone and I’m like, ‘What happened? Something has happened!’. I put on my glasses and said: ‘Leo is coming! It’s done! He has announced it!’ My wife said, ‘What do you mean he has announced it?’ I said: ‘He came on TV and said he’s coming to Inter Miami!’ She gives me goosebumps talking about it.
The former captain of the English team said that he immediately called the Cuban-American Jorge Masanother of the owners of the Miami franchise.
“I got emotional because I know what we’ve been through in recent years. Trying to build this club, the obstacles, the challenges: trying to get land (to build a stadium), going to legal battles… despite all the problems we’ve had, this moment changed everything. It changed our whole club.”
Several years ago, Beckham maintained, the idea of attracting the Argentine had arisen in the middle of a dinner, while they had a glass of wine.
“It all started from a conversation over a glass of wine at dinner. He turned to Jorge and told him: ‘One day we need Messi to come to our club’”.
It didn’t take long for the team to get to work. In September 2019 (months before Inter Miami played their first MLS game), “we got on a plane and flew to Barcelona from London in secret. We sneaked into a hotel, met Jorge Messi (Lionel’s father and agent) and started the conversation. It was purely: ‘We would love for your son to play for our team one day’. We know he can’t come yet, but one day we would love to have Leo in Miami.”
Over time, the project was completed. As Beckham warned at the time, it was an event “at the level of the biggest movements in the history of American sports”, because “bringing Leo Messi to Inter Miami, to MLS, the year after winning the Copa del World, to a team that is three years old… It is a great achievement”.
Regarding the impact and consequences of the presence of the rosarino star in the North American soccer league, the now 48-year-old businessman assessed that “Leo saw this as a project, a legacy, and I don’t think many players see it. They see the opportunity to play in different places, but Leo saw that (…) he could inspire the next generation and there is no better way to do that than by walking on our field in Miami and having all the kids talking about him, watching and learning. . It’s also about make this game bigger and better in this country: could do it, will do it and already has done it. It’s not just all of Miami that’s talking about Leo, it’s all of the United States, the whole world.”
