KINGSTON, Jamaica – It’s an hour before kickoff of Inter Miami’s Concacaf Champions Cup match here, and thousands of fans have their faces buried in their cell phones. Miami, and Lionel Messi, are set to take on Cavalier FC of the Jamaican Premier League. The Argentine’s arrival on the island has caused a bit of a sensation, and fans have arrived to the match hours early.
The atmosphere outside the ground has been lively all day, with vendors hawking jerk chicken and Red Stripe. The parking lots surrounding “The Office,” the country’s national stadium, have been full of music and weed smoke. But now, around precisely 6 p.m., an eerie quiet has come over the place. The fans, you see, are all trying to see whether Messi will even play.
Messi traveled, but rumors have been circulating he might not even make the gameday roster. He hasn’t played in three matches. Many fans have broken the bank to buy tickets to the game in a country where the median income pales in comparison to that of the United States.
Just after 7, the silence breaks. You can almost feel the place exhale. Messi isn’t starting, but he’s in the 18. The party resumes.
It’s still unclear how much of a part Messi will play, with Miami comfortably ahead in the two-legged affair and Messi resting his two legs amid a busy stretch and with a pair of huge World Cup qualifiers beckoning. To the thousands of Jamaicans who’ve come to pay their respects, just seeing him in the flesh might be enough. But within hours, Messi will put all of that uncertainty to bed. He’ll show up, enter the match to an earth-shaking ovation and he’ll even find the back of the net, sending The Office into delirium.
To see Lionel Messi in the United States is to see him commodified. To see him in Jamaica, or in nearly any other corner of the globe, is to see him adored and idolized.
The madness wound up materializing on matchday. The Argentine megastar can inspire hysteria, like the Beatles or Michael Jackson. And in the hours leading up to his arrival, internet sleuths were able to find Inter Miami’s flight number, a private charter, and they’ve been tracking it as it makes the quick journey south. Messi’s plane is due to land at any moment.
The scene at the airport in Kingston, though, is decidedly sleepy. There’s nobody here to greet Miami, not in any unofficial capacity anyways. A customs agent has dozed off at her post as she waits for the last of the night’s international flights to arrive. Out in the parking lot, a pack of stray dogs keeps watch over a handful of cars. Messi descends the stairs of Miami’s charter and is greeted by the country’s minister of sport, who gives him a Bob Marley T-shirt.
“Nobody came out to meet him because we know how to act,” says Michelle Neita, an innkeeper from the north side of Kingston who is in her early 60s. “We chill. I used to watch Bob Marley play football in his front yard. We’d just wave and say hello. It’s no big thing.”
The airport atmosphere is mirrored at Miami’s swanky downtown hotel. On previous trips, fans stalked Messi’s every move, setting up camp at his hotel, sometimes for days. There’s not a single person here as a pair of charter buses drops the team off in Kingston. It’s borderline bizarre to witness.
This was not the scene some 50 years ago, the last time a real footballing legend visited the island. In 1971, tiny Cavalier FC, of all teams, faced off against Santos FC, Pelé’s longtime club. The Brazilian was a god in the Caribbean, about the only notable player that many football fans and players in the region had access to in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. He was mobbed in the streets during his visit and received the key to the city. The match ended several minutes early when fans stormed the field.
Among the 35,000 or so in attendance that day was Clive Toye, the general manager of the New York Cosmos, an unknown, month-old club in the nascent North American Soccer League. It was in Kingston, Toye remembers, where he initially pitched Pelé on a move stateside, one that would prove instrumental in the development of American soccer.
“I said to him that if you go elsewhere you can win another championship. But if you come with me, you can win an entire country,” Toye recalls.
Four years later, Pelé had inked global football’s biggest-ever contract with the Cosmos. At the end of the 1975 season, they embarked on a three-continent, 10-city tour. Pelé was marched out like a show pony at every stop. Charlie Martinelli, the Cosmos’ former equipment manager, remembers riding in a limousine with him in Haiti. Pelé dangled himself out the window to greet the thousands of fans who’d lined the streets to see him.
“Truly, he always did what was asked of him,” says Martinelli. “He always wanted to promote the game of soccer, more than anything.”
By the time the Cosmos came to Kingston towards the end of that tour, Pelé was gassed. Some 45,000 turned up to the national stadium to see him that day, the largest crowd to ever witness a sporting event in the island’s history. Midway through the second half, a Jamaican player lunged towards Pelé, raking his boot across the Brazilian’s knee. He was carried off the field, while the Jamaican player was booed off of it. And yet still — bruised, battered and beaten, Pelé took the field just days later against the Puerto Rican national team in San Juan.
The Cosmos once sent Pelé out on horseback wearing a 10-gallon hat before a match in Colorado, a hilarious (albeit humiliating) exercise. The thought of Messi doing something like that is unimaginable, rightly and understandably so. Soccer has a much firmer foothold in America now than it did in the mid-70s, and the public’s expectations of access are different as well. Messi is the latest in a long line of global superstars to come play soccer in America largely to have semblance of normalcy and to be left alone. He said as much not long after arriving in Miami.
“My decision took a lot of things into consideration (before I came here),” Messi told The Athletic back then. “We thought about it, my kids and my wife were part of the decision, my family in general. I honestly don’t think of (being an ambassador for the game). I just came here to enjoy playing football, which is what I’ve enjoyed my entire life. I chose this place for that reason over anything else.”
Messi, who will turn 38 this summer, has missed his share of matches during his time in MLS, some of them unexpectedly. Over 71,000 fans turned up in Atlanta in the summer of 2023, only to watch hopelessly as Messi remained in Miami managing his workload. Injuries, too, have taken their toll, as they did a couple of weeks ago when he missed a match against the Houston Dynamo, compelling the club to give away tickets to future games to unhappy fans.
Miami’s embarrassment of riches creates an almost perverse situation when Messi misses a match, one where fans are “forced” to watch a trio of other generational talents — Luis Suárez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba — ride out their golden years in front of them. Any one of those players, on any other team, would be an instant draw. On Miami, Messi dwarfs them all. And in Jamaica, his three former Barcelona teammates alone simply won’t cut it.
Whatever chill the Jamaicans had at the airport and the hotel evaporates pretty quickly at The Office. Miami’s team buses are mobbed as they arrive. This is Messi’s first competitive exposure to the joys of Concacaf. Though he’s played friendlies in Honduras and Panama, his only match of importance in continental competition came last year in a loss at Monterrey, in a stadium that outshines many MLS venues.
That’s not the case at The Office. The stadium is charming, for certain, and a point of national pride, but it’s seen better days. Its concrete facade is crumbling, and about a third of its lights don’t work. Neither does the scoreboard, or the PA system, or much of anything else. Soccer’s place in Jamaica’s sporting hierarchy can kind of be seen in the stadium itself — the pitch is ringed by a gleaming, beautiful running track, and even a velodrome, setting the fans well back from the action. The playing surface itself doesn’t feel like a priority.
This isn’t San Pedro Sula, San Salvador or even the Estadio Nacional in Costa Rica, but Jamaican fans know how to make life difficult for their opponents. Miami players are roundly booed as they take the field for warm-ups, largely because Messi is nowhere to be found. Cavalier is greeted with adulation. It has recently become a dominant team in Jamaican football, having won the league twice in the last three years and hoisted a Caribbean Cup (Concacaf’s Caribbean club championship) as well. By the standards of the JPL, it’s a highly competitive side.
Panic has set in again as the crowd wonders where Messi is. A late scratch, perhaps? Most of them realize that the Argentine rarely, if ever, comes out for warm-ups if he isn’t starting, and eventually — as his teammates are taking their team photo and the match is preparing to start — Messi emerges from the tunnel. The entire stadium explodes in applause, and every camera in the stadium swings towards him as he sports a pinnie on the bench. The bizarre nature of all of this feels pretty apparent at moments like these, when tens of thousands of fans are simply staring at a man sitting down. It is true idolatry.
The task at hand feels impossible for Cavalier, but it does well to control the match early on. Despite the region’s colonial connection to the UK and Spain, soccer in the Caribbean draws its primary influence from the flair of South American football, frequently prioritizing individual skill and flair over organization. Tonight, Cavalier is very much playing that way, with the crowd of some 30,000 shrieking in delight every time one of its players makes a dangerous run or completes a sometimes pointless stepover.
Suárez gets the opener when he converts a penalty kick midway through the first half, effectively ending the series with an away goal. Cavalier soldiers on and creates a few chances of its own, but at this point, the stadium is fixated on one thing alone. Fans roar in approval early in the second half when Messi rises from the bench and begins warming up on the sideline.
The excitement graduates into hysterics as he enters the match in the 53rd minute. Suárez and Busquets are subbed out, not that anybody cares, and Messi takes the field to a thunderous ovation. Just moments into his appearance, he collects a ball at the top of the penalty area and swivels around three defenders, nearly doubling the lead.
Messi spends long stretches of his appearance glowering at his teammates when they fail to play him through or make an errant pass. He frequently does this, as do most great players — their expectation of greatness is impossible to turn off. He finally gets that decisive set-up, from Santiago Morales, and he scores with one of the final touches of the game. The clinical finish sends the entire stadium into rapt appreciation once again. Chants of “Messi! Messi!” fill the air.
MESSIIIII 🐐
Leo Messi scores in stoppage time for Inter Miami! 🙌 pic.twitter.com/aLPTga0Ynd
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) March 14, 2025
After the final whistle blows, Messi is mobbed by opposing players. Only one asks him for his shirt. The rest just want a selfie. Like the fans in attendance, many of Cavalier’s players just wanted a look at him, too.
As fans empty out into the streets, a blood moon casts an eerie glow over the stadium. It’s the beginning of a lunar eclipse, a bit of a rarity. Messi’s visit here is even scarcer. He is unlikely to ever play again in Jamaica, and there’s no immediate heir to his throne. Cavalier will move back to its much smaller stadium next door, and the spotlight will once again feel much dimmer.
Pelé never came back, not to play, anyways, but the effects of his frequent visits to the Caribbean were massive, spurring along the region’s first real football boom. Caribbean players became key contributors in the growth of American soccer, as well, finding success in the NASL and even in the college ranks, where a core of Caribbean players formed the backbone of Howard University’s championship-winning teams of the early and mid-70s.
Rudolph Speid, Cavalier’s head coach, remembers all of this. He’s proud of his side’s performance, he says, and as he sits in a cramped media room he can’t help but wonder if Messi’s visit might help push Jamaican soccer even further forward.
“Losing 4-0 over two legs is nothing to be ashamed of,” Speid says. “I’ve seen MLS teams lose 6-2 to them, in one game, without even Messi being there. To host a game here, in a sold-out stadium — I’ve seen the young kids faces, when they see Messi, to see how delighted they are. I think you’ll see another 10, 20,000 girls and boys coming out to play the game after this. You’ll see more coaches coming out and getting involved too.”
Speid may well be right. He also knows what the thousands in attendance tonight came to see. He’s clearly downtrodden at the loss but his affect changes a bit. He cracks a smile.
“And Messi scored a goal, too,” Speid says, laughing. “So everybody’s happy I guess.”
(Top photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
