As so many soccer fans know so well, Lionel Messi stands a modest 5 feet 7 inches (170 centimeters) in height.
He’s the elephant in the room for Vancouver Whitecaps FC, though, both on and off the pitch, as Inter Miami CF visit BC Place for Thursday night’s Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal first leg (10:30 pm ET | FS1, OneSoccer; TUDN, ViX).
A sellout crowd of more than 50,000 was already expected for this massive occasion. When Messi, who was left to rest at home for the Herons’ league visit to British Columbia last year, was spotted among the IMCF traveling party jetting some 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) across North America on Wednesday, ticket prices on the secondhand market tripled. The spike in enthusiasm about the Argentine megastar’s latest visit to Canada is also a reminder to the ‘Caps about the magnitude of the task in front of them.
“Lionel Messi is a special player for this sport. What he has been contributing to this sport, the way he has played and delighted people over the past 20 years is, of course, special. That will be silly of me to say something else,” Whitecaps head coach Jesper Sørensen said in Wednesday night’s matchday-1 press conference.
“It’s special that he is playing for Miami and we’re playing Miami. But on the other side, it’s not Vancouver against Messi, it’s Vancouver against Miami. And we’re not here to celebrate Messi. We’re here to do whatever we can to see if we can move on.”
Massive test
The Whitecaps ranked 27th in Forbes' 2025 ranking of the most valuable MLS teams with an estimated valuation of $440 million, about a third of No. 2 Miami’s. Their market is about half the size of Miami’s in terms of population, and their 2024 salary spend added up to about 40% of IMCF’s, according to MLS Players Association documents. Thursday’s gate will quite likely be their biggest attendance of the year.
It is no slight to Sørensen’s squad to state that they have no one on their current roster with anywhere near the pedigree or name recognition of Messi or his ‘Fab Four’ teammates and friends Luis Suárez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba. The one ‘Cap who might merit a mention in this discussion, captain and top earner Ryan Gauld, is currently sidelined by a knee injury.
Even Miami’s ownership group has A-list juice, headlined by David Beckham, who crystallized their approach in Apple TV’s documentary series ‘Onside: Major League Soccer.’
“My dream was always to bring the best players to Miami. It's not just about bringing the best player there ever was – we've brought in four superstars,” declared the English icon. “Our vision: We wanted to create one of the biggest clubs in the world, and I just think it's good for the sport, I think it's good for the club, I think it's great for the league … I think this is a league that really needs stars.”
His colleague Jorge Mas, the driving force behind the Miami Freedom Park stadium project which the Herons will open next year, was even blunter.
“We just don't want to be another Major League Soccer club. More important to both of us, is that it'd be a global team,” said IMCF’s managing owner. “We're building our galacticos. We always want to have players to attract global attention.”
Showcase occasion
Vancouver, meanwhile, are publicly up for sale. The group headed by Greg Kerfoot, Steve Luczo, Jeff Mallett and Steve Nash announced in December their intentions to pass the torch, followed by more recent revelations of talks with the city about a new soccer-specific stadium of their own at the Pacific National Exhibition Fairgrounds; they are tenants at provincially-owned BC Place.
For all that, Vancouver can reasonably aspire to stand toe to toe with the star-studded Herons over these 180 minutes of play. The ‘Caps sit a nose ahead of them in the Supporters’ Shield standings (albeit on a slightly lower points-per-game pace) and both their expected and actual goal differential are tops in MLS. They have been a proactive, ball-dominant side in both MLS and CCC action despite facing a brutal string of ConcaChampions opponents in Costa Rica's Deportivo Saprissa and Mexico's CF Monterrey and Pumas UNAM.
“I didn't watch them last season, but for me, it's not a surprise,” IMCF head coach Javier Mascherano said on Wednesday. “I was watching them, and they play really well. They have very, very good players in front. They have very good wingers, strikers, good midfielders. They play together, scoring a lot of goals; they didn't concede too many goals.
“You can find two teams that are in a good position, in a good moment, both. So hopefully, I expect my team to have a good game, trying to be narrow, trying to stop them in attack, because they are very dangerous in attack. But also we want to have the ball, we want to be the protagonist in the game.”
Different approaches
Amid all those contrasts, this isn’t quite a David-and-Goliath matchup, and that fact epitomizes both the core MLS tenets of parity and balance, and a glorious quirk of soccer writ large.
“I always try to explain to people that you can be successful with so different approaches, and that works all over the planet,” Vancouver CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster told MLSsoccer.com last week. “Miami has a completely different approach, and for their market, that is the absolute right approach. With this approach, they are very successful, and we are at the other end of the spectrum.
“You have to know what you stand for, and we stand for a different approach.”
VWFC have long sought to compete via marginal gains, leveraging analytics, clever scouting, a collectivist ethos and a large academy system whose catchment area sweeps across eight of Canada’s 10 provinces. While only two of their players earn more than US$1 million in guaranteed annual compensation as of 2024, 15 nations are represented on their first-team roster, and their lineups are dotted with reclamation projects and other clubs’ undervalued assets.
Some would label them the anti-Miami, and that only adds to the appeal of this all-MLS semifinal that concludes next Wednesday at Miami's Chase Stadium. The aggregate winner is guaranteed to face a LIGA MX foe, either Cruz Azul or Tigres UANL, in the June 1 final.
“We cannot only rely on a certain core group of players all the time, and if they don't play, our performance has a negative impact,” said Schuster. “So it wasn't about bringing in the one player who says, ‘I'm here, I'm the starter, I run the show.’
“That's the beauty about our sport,” he added. “We have the chance to scout and recruit from 190 countries and from so many different leagues, and our sport allows so many different approaches.”
