Leo Messi in Paris. Leo Messi in Miami. The majority of Barcelona fans follow in the wake of the best player they have never seen or will ever see with a mixture of insufferable nostalgia and unlimited admiration. They feel it is theirs but it no longer belongs to them. They see his goals and his plays now dressed in pink and they celebrate and regret them at the same time, a strange sensation, longing for what could have been and was not, an impossible thing. There is a culé that copes better than the rest with this distance from the star. Especially because he has it close. His name is Xavier Asensi and currently, after working for ten years at the Barça club and leaving it because of Barçagate (he refused to sign any invoice with the company I3 Ventures as commercial director), he is the chief executive officer of Inter Miami, its Chief Business Officer. So that it is understood, a general director of plenipotentiary influence like Ferran Reverter should have been at Barça until he resigned from the position. Above, Asensi responds only to three people, the owner Jorge Mas and his brother Jose, co-owner, and David Beckham, founder and also co-owner of the club.
Asensi, born 42 years ago in Barcelona but from Sabadell at heart, received a colossal assignment as soon as he was recruited for Inter Miami in 2021: to place the club at the top of Major League Soccer (MLS) and try to sign Messi . At that time, Inter, especially through Beckham, had already done previous work to approach the star by asserting the collegiality to which only the big stars have access. The Argentine had been responding with winks to the courtship ritual for some time; he even bought a home there for his family, but everything else was missing. Asensi ended up achieving it. Circumstances favored him, as he himself admits, but the plan had been brewing for years: “It is often said that luck occurs when opportunity coincides with preparation. And that's what happened." Asensi gives more details: “We signed contracts in 2021 with sponsors adding clauses in case we suddenly grew tenfold as a club. Obviously we did not use Messi's name, but now, with him here, thanks to those clauses those contracts have multiplied." The stage was set but “the circumstances” that, produced in a chain, shaped the footballer's will, were missing. Four were indispensable: the tearful goodbye from Barcelona absolutely against his wish, the lack of attachment to his experience in Paris, the liberating triumph in the World Cup with Argentina and the fictitious approach of a Barça held with economically clamps that he confused desired with reality.
Reviewing the brutal impact that Messi has had on Inter Miami with immediate effect delves into the wound of what could have been and was not with Barça mentioned at the beginning. Asensi tells La Vanguardia the advantages of having the “best player in history”, recalling and updating the formula of the virtuous circle. “If you have the best footballers, you get better results, if you get better results, your chances of winning increase, and if you win more games and titles your social mass increases and your global income, too.”
There are endless examples that illustrate the transformation that the club has experienced since Messi's arrival. You have to start, of course, on the sporting level. Inter Miami used to lose and now they are used to winning. As simple as that. The victories and the ten's dominance over the games follow one another, governing them, assisting, dribbling and scoring goals. There are those who maintain that all this happens because the MLS is a minor league. Could be. Maybe they forget that he's been doing that for his entire career.
There are also extra-sports signs that help understand this exponential growth. Adidas, the brand that dresses all MLS clubs, has had to react and supply the market with an additional production of this season's Inter jerseys because they have been sold out all over the world. The production of the coming season will be comparable to that of a club like Atlético de Madrid. “We have gone from being a young team in a league with a mostly local following to having a leading position in Sports Business in the country with the largest commercial market in the world,” congratulates Asensi, who remembers that the US will be the country organizer of the Copa América in 2024, the club World Cup in 2025, and the national team World Cup in 2026.
More evidence. There are no tickets left to sell. Pending the construction of the new stadium in 2025, the current one can accommodate 21,000 spectators and 15,000 are season ticket holders. The rest of the seats are already sold at high but very attractive prices for the “secondary market”, that is, within the reach of the highest bidder in a resale that is legal in the US. There is so much demand that to access the VIP boxes there is a waiting list. Everyone wants to see Leo Messi play.
Graduate in International Business with complementary studies at Stanford, entrepreneur with several years of professional experience in China, recruited to FC Barcelona by Sandro Rosell in order to explore the Asian market... When he reviews his resume, it is likely that Asensi will look back and none of that fills him more than the signing of Lionel Messi, the operation that shook the American sports industry.
