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We understand, old man: Good luck with that Florida retirement. That’s essentially what FC Barcelona said about its most storied alum’s desire to go play in Miami. The club’s snippy statement read in part: “Barcelona president (Joan) Laporta understood and respected Messi’s decision to want to compete in a league with fewer demands, further away from the spotlight and the pressure he has been subject to in recent years.”

At 35, Lionel Messi, arguably the best player to ever play the world’s default sport, appears poised to become the latest global star called upon to enhance the sport’s stature in the United States. Upon the winding down of his contract at Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain, Messi announced he wants to come to Inter Miami—and Major League Soccer—for what will presumably be his last act on the field. He reportedly considered two other enticing offers: one for a romantic return to Barcelona, the club he grew up at (literally, having been signed at age 13); the other to head to Saudi Arabia for an astonishing half a billion dollars a year.

Barcelona’s statement depicting Messi’s decision as a tired old man’s yearning to step away from the arena is well aligned with how Europeans have long looked (down) at America’s place in international soccer—but it’s a view that’s quite out of touch with reality.

America’s underappreciated rise in global sport is as much a story about technology and media as it is about the games we play and watch. With its embrace of the international varietal of football, the U.S. is becoming a global sports hub in the same way it has long been a hub for music and film. Meanwhile, the value of sporting content has dramatically appreciated as almost all other “televised” (increasingly streamed) entertainment has become more and more Balkanized. Live sport, as I’ve written for Future Tense before, is the only type of fare routinely able to bring together the type of mass audiences that in the not-too-distant past could be counted on to watch generic network TV sitcoms or dramas. This is what’s driving the surge in value of all sporting franchises and their media rights, and hence the globalization of all sport. And because soccer has a reach that has proved elusive to American-born sports, U.S. sports interests are gobbling up global brands like the English Premier League’s Arsenal (acquired by the owners of the Los Angeles Rams) and Liverpool (which now shares owners with the Boston Red Sox).

It’s true that Major League Soccer’s level of play still pales in comparison to La Liga, the Spanish domestic league presided over by Barcelona and Real Madrid. But what Barcelona’s haughty attitude toward Messi’s move misses is that the Argentine star is being signed by Apple as much as he is being signed by Inter Miami. The details of the deal haven’t been spelled out, and are probably still being ironed out, but it has been widely reported that the tech giant made the move feasible by offering Messi a cut of its soccer-related Apple TV+ income. (Adidas will also be supplementing the player’s direct compensation.)

Last year, in a surprising and unusual deal, Apple TV+ (the streaming service that brought you Ted Lasso) acquired the worldwide rights to stream MLS games for the next decade. Now Apple seems to have hired the show’s leading man and offered him points on the deal. Messi is reportedly being offered an equity stake in the league as well. (David Beckham is one of Inter Miami’s owners because he himself was offered an option to buy into the league when he was lured to heighten interest in the MLS back in 2007.)

This mediafication of sport is here to stay. Purists would like to believe that sporting leagues go about their own business organically and make agreements with media companies on the side. But really, these worlds are now explicitly converged: Professional sport’s organic purpose is to serve as media content.

Welcome to Wrexham is a case study in this convergence. The popular reality show, another one of many cultural mileposts in soccer’s rise in American culture, came about not because someone in Hollywood thought it would be a good idea to cover the intriguing acquisition of a small Welsh club by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. The entire purpose of the two actors’ takeover of the club—and of Wrexham’s subsequent quest to climb the pyramid of the British game—is the documentary. Netflix’s Drive to Survive series has proved similarly transformational for another rapidly globalizing sport: Formula 1.

Andrés Martinez
Why Sports Are a Game-Changer for Streaming

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One intriguing subplot to Messi’s decision to come to the U.S. instead of Saudi Arabia is that the Persian Gulf states are competing with American sports interests to accelerate the globalization of sport. They are the latest regimes to want to refurbish or launder their brands (what is often called “sportswashing”) via an association with sport and its mediatic power. The Saudis, who’d earlier contracted Messi to be a goodwill tourism ambassador for the kingdom, are eager to catch up to their Qatari and Emirati neighbors as major stakeholders in European football and are plowing a fortune into their own domestic league, attracting other aging stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema. And this week, the Saudis’ audacious bid to take over top-flight golf paid ample dividends with the surprising announcement of a planned LIV Golf-PGA merger.

But three years out from the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America, the most compelling merger to keep an eye on is the evolving one between the world’s top sport and its reigning pop-culture superpower. Soccer, media, and the tech platforms that connect the world need one another and were always meant to come together here. (It is no accident that it took the non-American sport to provide a global hit to Apple and the American tech giant to take a show about the English Premier League to all corners of the world.)

So, Messi, if you’re able to finalize the deal you’ve chosen to pursue, welcome to the U.S. Contrary to what your old friends in Barcelona say, you won’t be further away from the spotlight here. You’ll be in control of it.

Here are some stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

Future Tense Fiction

May’s fiction story was “I Know Thy Works,” by Tara Isabella Burton. The story imagines an app that tracks your every move to spit out a publicly available ethics score—tracking morality as one might track productivity. At a dinner party, an unexpected group tries to escape this ethical surveillance—but something goes terribly wrong. The response essay, written by Suren Jayasuriya, explores how computing is moving toward quantifying increasingly abstract values. (Plus, don’t miss our new Future Tense Fiction podcast episodes: “This, but Again” with David Iserson and “Collateral Damage” with Justina Ireland.)

Wish We’d Published This

“A.I. Chatbots Lose Money Every Time You Use Them. That Is a Problem,” by Will Oremus, the Washington Post.

Future Tense Recommends 

BlackBerry. Marveling over the greatest mobile tech gadget prior to the iPhone is a bit like waxing poetic about the technological marvel of the horse-drawn carriage, but this movie, about the rise and fall of the tech startup inauspiciously located in a town called Waterloo, is an insightful and hilarious romp through a crucial transition period in digital history. Beyond the nostalgia those of us of a certain age feel for that old double-thumbed keyboard that liberated us from our desks, this adaptation of Losing the Signal is a potent reminder that the company’s true technological breakthrough was its efficient deployment of network bandwidth.

What Next: TBD

On Friday’s episode of Slate’s technology podcast, host Lizzie O’Leary and Bloomberg’s Stacy-Marie Ishmael discussed what the SEC’s recent crackdown on Binance and Coinbase means for the future of crypto. Last week, guest host Emily Peck spoke to Kathryn Lindsay, a tech and culture writer, about kids who have grown up to be horrified by the details their parents shared about them online—and how parents are negotiating what’s OK to post. Emily also spoke to Don Clark about Nvidia’s meteoric rise to the top of the A.I. hype cycle. On Sunday, Lizzie will bring on Slate’s Heather Tal Murphy to discuss her reporting on what A.I. is really doing to acting.

Upcoming Event

On Tuesday, June 20, at 12:30 p.m. ET, join New America’s Open Technology Institute and Wikimedia for a hybrid event on Section 230 and the public interest. The event will feature a keynote speech and conversation with Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the original co-authors of Section 230, as well as conversations with leaders from the Internet Archive and Wikimedia to discuss what’s at stake in the Section 230 reform debate. RSVP today to attend in person or online.

Future Tense
is a partnership of
Slate,
New America, and
Arizona State University
that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.