‘Merit-based’ or Messi based? How Inter Miami became the Club World Cup’s controversial opening act

Speculation mounted with 10 months to go, and with the Club World Cup in a cloud of uncertainty. Thirty of 32 teams had qualified for the first-of-its-kind tournament. But negotiations with Apple TV had collapsed, and other broadcasters were “skeptical.” Sponsors were also lukewarm (and litigious), in part because the inaugural competition, now billed as “The Best v The Best,” lacked some star power. Neither Barcelona nor Liverpool would be involved, nor would Lionel Messi nor Cristiano Ronaldo.

And so, the theory goes, somewhere behind closed doors, FIFA concocted plans to fix that.

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One of the two final seats at the Club World Cup would go to South America’s 2024 champion. The other was a “host country” slot that, for more than a year, had remained unexplained and unfilled. FIFA, even when asked, would not say how a U.S. team, presumably one from Major League Soccer, could claim it. MLS clubs waited, eyeing the global stage, hoping for a chance to play on it.

Then, on the final day of the MLS regular season, FIFA president Gianni Infantino appeared in South Florida. He stepped onto a podium at Chase Stadium, and announced that Messi’s Inter Miami, with a record-breaking tally of 74 regular-season points, had qualified. In fact, they would host the opener.

The announcement rankled some MLS clubs, who felt that others — perhaps the Columbus Crew, the reigning champions and Leagues Cup winner — were more deserving. Some felt that the playoffs, and December’s MLS Cup, should have settled the debate. Some took issue with the opacity of the process.

But FIFA felt otherwise.

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And so, on Saturday, Messi will star in the Club World Cup’s opening act. He’ll ignite a tournament that’s been both ridiculed and celebrated. He’ll draw devoted viewers from all across the globe to Inter Miami vs. Egypt’s Al Ahly, and help FIFA launch this “new era of club football.” He’ll also help make it controversial.

FIFA’s vague criteria, Inter Miami’s timely surge

The backstory begins in February 2023, before Messi was even in Miami. FIFA allocated 31 of 32 Club World Cup slots to its six continental confederations — 12 to Europe, six to South America, four each to Asia, Africa and the rest of the Americas, one to Oceania — and the 32nd to its host, the United States.

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A month later, it announced the “principles of access,” the qualification criteria. Each continental champion from 2021-2024 would get a berth. The rest would go to the best-rated clubs in objective rankings. The aim, FIFA said, was to ensure “the highest quality possible based on sporting criteria.” It has since sold the Club World Cup as “merit-based.”

But it left one piece of the criteria open. “For the host country [spot],” it said, “access … will be determined at a later stage.”

For 19 months thereafter, the criteria remained undetermined. In the summer and fall of 2024, however, the growing suspicion — according to multiple people with second-hand knowledge of discussions, who spoke to Yahoo Sports both at the time and more recently in retrospect — was that, as one source said, “FIFA wanted Messi in the tournament, and they were gonna do what they needed to do, engineer what they needed to do, in order to select [Inter Miami].”

Inter Miami, meanwhile, made the engineering easier. The Herons were running away with the MLS Supporters’ Shield, the trophy awarded to the top team in the regular season. There was talk, including from MLS commissioner Don Garber, of a high-stakes playoff between the winners of the Shield and MLS Cup, the league’s postseason title. “There’s a wide variety of things that we’re toying around with,” Garber said in July.

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Garber said that he and the league had “made suggestions to FIFA.” But ever since Oct. 19 — when Infantino appeared in Fort Lauderdale and told Inter Miami: “as one of the best clubs in the world, you are deserved participants in the new FIFA Club World Cup 2025” — MLS has distanced itself from the discussions. The decision, people throughout the league say, was FIFA’s.

FIFA, in a news release, said that Miami was chosen “on the basis of the club’s outstanding and consistent 34-match campaign,” but never explained why no criteria were ever outlined publicly.

A litmus test for MLS, a launchpad for FIFA

A few weeks after their Club World Cup spot was confirmed, Messi and Miami fell in the first round of the playoffs to Atlanta. The Los Angeles Galaxy went on to win MLS Cup, their sixth. A few months later, Galaxy president Dan Beckerman told Yahoo Sports: “We’re disappointed that we were not invited to participate [in the Club World Cup]. Our hope was that being the MLS Cup champion would warrant an invitation.”

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Other MLS clubs would’ve loved to participate, too. But many understood that Miami, in some ways, was a near-ideal representative. Inter and LAFC — who became the third MLS team to qualify, via a controversial play-in game — are the league’s two most popular and valuable franchises. They have the most recognizable faces and names. They’re also good — which, at the end of the day, will be the most important attribute.

It will be viewed as a litmus test of the league’s growth or lack thereof. And who better to exemplify that growth than Lionel Messi?

To critics, the GOAT’s presence will undermine the Club World Cup’s “merit-based” legitimacy. It epitomizes a tournament that sometimes seems more about dollars than soccer. It aligns with Infantino’s public push to get Cristiano Ronaldo on one of the 32 teams. (Ronaldo has since opted to stay at Al-Nassr, which didn’t qualify.)

To most of the football world, though, the GOAT is the GOAT. Messi will bring thousands to Hard Rock Stadium on Saturday night (8 p.m. ET, TBS/Univision/DAZN). He will lead Inter Miami out of a tunnel, toward FIFA’s new frontier. And the Club World Cup, with more buzz than it otherwise would’ve had, will have liftoff.