In Messi’s orbit, even a Timbers loss comes with different stakes
Portland lost 2-0. But that wasn't the whole story.
MIAMI — MLS is not the same league for everyone.
That was on full display Sunday at Nu Stadium, the $1 billion megacomplex that opened last month as the presumed final home for Lionel Messi.
Messi needs no introduction here, other than to note that after one of the greatest careers at the highest levels of soccer, he joined MLS in 2023, led Miami to a league title and collected a pair of MVP trophies.
He’s 38 now. He’s past his prime. And his 11 goals coming into Sunday were only one short of league-leader Hugo Cuypers, a player nine years his junior.
That is part of what makes MLS strange and compelling. For Messi, the league is a final act. For Portland’s James Pantemis, it is a platform to make a World Cup roster. For Finn Surman, it is a launching pad.
Same field, same match, entirely different stakes.
On Sunday, Messi’s name populated the majority of backs making the pilgrimage from the massive parking garage, to a gaudy stadium entrance that still had that “new house” smell, to one of the only sections in professional sports dedicated to an active player: the Leo Messi Stand on the stadium’s east side.
Just before kickoff, after shaking hands and taking a photo with Portland 40-year-old Diego Chara, a stadium DJ called for chants of “Messi. Messi. Messi.”
Energy shot through the stadium every time Messi touched the ball, then the crowd erupted in the 31st minute when he scored his 12th goal of the year off a give-and-go. It was technically the game-winning goal, though far from anything that’ll show up on the career highlights of a player who has scored more than 900 times.
But Messi has also tallied more than 400 career assists — and his first against Portland, the one where he pinballed through four Timbers before sliding a pass over to Germán Berterame for the 2-0 lead, was world-class.
For a Portland team that has struggled to score goals and win on the road, that was the difference.
“We need our big players to score goals,” Portland manager Phil Neville said after the loss to his former club. “This game was about the big players scoring goals and I felt like that was the difference between the two teams.”
Portland didn’t need to be world-class on Sunday. Miami had conceded nine goals in its three matches prior. The Timbers just needed something that, as has been the case more often than not in 2026, they couldn’t find.
In the larger picture, Sunday was a failure for a team with one game remaining before the World Cup hiatus.
But the Messi thing was different.
Neville called it “the elephant in the room,” and acknowledged that one can prepare as if it were any other game, but …
“You can say you’re going to be OK, you’re not going to be nervous, until you step on the pitch,” Neville said.
Pantemis met the moment.
In one of his final showcases before Team Canada decides on its World Cup roster, Pantemis stopped Messi point-blank in the fourth minute, again on a curling shot destined for the top corner in the second half and then produced what may have been the save of the year in stoppage time, when his full-out extension denied a Messi free kick.
It was the kind of save that follows a goalkeeper around, especially when a World Cup roster is about to be picked.
That’s the type of spotlight Messi brings.
Granted, Surman didn’t really care about any of that.
Unlike Messi, Surman is on the other side of the league’s equation. For Messi, MLS is a step before retirement. For Surman, who joined Portland in 2024 as a 21-year-old playing outside of New Zealand for the first time, MLS should be the step before stardom.
He’s an All-Star. He was just named to New Zealand’s World Cup roster. He expects himself to meet the moment against the world’s best, which is why he didn’t seem particularly impressed with his block of the legend in the 68th minute, when Messi got the ball in his spot at the top of the box but couldn’t find an opening between Surman and the net.
“It was just like normal,” Surman said. “I was just annoyed that we were losing at the time.
“I think everyone kind of has their own preparations with that sort of stuff, whether it’s big players or a big game or anything like that. One thing that we kind of said was that, you know, play the game, not the occasion. Don’t get caught up in that. And that’s all you can do at the end of the day. They’re amazing players. But they’re still just football players.”
It’s what makes the league special: Surman’s boat is heading in one direction, Messi’s yacht in the other, and both are playing on the same pitch.
Yes, Portland lost. But sometimes in the orbit of Messi, it’s not just the larger picture that matters. Little wins can matter, too.
Maybe that was the win for Surman. Sitting in a small office inside the visitors’ locker room, in a setting reminiscent of where he made his postgame media debut two years ago in Seattle, he had proof that he could really treat this one like any of the others.
“I’d like to say that no matter what age I am or I’ve been, that I would just go out and kind of play my game and try to be myself,” Surman said. “But I don’t know. Because two years ago, Finn is probably a different person to what I am now.”
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor