Even when their team suffers defeat, it’s customary for a coach to try backing their players’ effort.
It’s a custom with understandable intention, to keep a fanbase from turning on a team or to reassure players that their jobs won’t suffer for one bad result. Still, some games make it difficult to dawdle through answers padded with such niceties. Javier Mascherano faced that reality after his Inter Miami crashed out of the Concacaf Champions Cup on Wednesday, losing the semifinal home leg 3-1 to cap a 5-1 aggregate toppling.
“I think we competed—but let’s be honest, it’s hard to say that when you lose 1-5,” Mascherano said after his team was eliminated.
Trailing 2-0 after last week’s opening leg in British Colombia, Miami aimed to send a message early in front of their own fans. Their proactive nature led to a swift opening goal, with Jordi Alba powering a shot off of Vancouver goalkeeper Yohei Takaoka in the ninth minute. Soon after, they saw midfielder Tadeo Allende force Takaoka into a diving save. Surely, it seemed, they’d keep on pressuring until Lionel Messi made a typically brilliant and decisive mark.
Vancouver’s Brian White played a key role in Inter Miami’s exit. (Michael Pimentel / ISI Photos / Getty Images)
After all, Messi’s heroics led them to a stunning victory in the 2023 Leagues Cup. So, too, was he at the fore as they claimed the 2024 Supporters’ Shield with Messi winning MVP honors at season’s end. And yet, with Vancouver keeping Messi from notching a goal or an assist across 180 minutes, Miami’s supporting cast was unable to swing the result. The Whitecaps scored twice early in the second half, and there was never any real hope that Miami could reach this tournament’s final after the 51st minute.
“In games like this, the price of mistakes is brutal,” Mascherano said. “You’re playing a team that has the edge, and they don’t let you off the hook. We made errors, and they hit us with two goals in three minutes. That’s just not acceptable in a semifinal — especially right after halftime. It happened to us against Dallas a few days ago, and it happened again tonight.
“I could maybe understand a lapse 15 minutes from the end, but not at the start of the second half. That’s just not good enough.”
Mascherano arrived in November, weeks after Miami was eliminated from the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs in a first-round upset against Atlanta United. Before that postseason even concluded, Miami was hard at work to reinvent itself and go again, having missed on winning arguably the two biggest trophies on offer in Messi’s first eighteen months.
The first, MLS Cup, is the league’s top honor. Even a record points haul in a regular season only gives a team so much of an advantage. Their first round opponent knows they just have to win two games of three to overcome a considerable deficit forged from the preceding 34-game season. However, it should go without saying that the field of possible winners is relatively narrow and easy to size up, no matter how often the league launches a new expansion side.
The league’s schedule hasn’t been balanced since 2014, but the format is identical across all 30 teams in competition. The ground rules have been laid; may the most worthy team win.
The second, the Concacaf Champions Cup, has historically been far more difficult for an MLS team to claim. The league’s roster rules are curated to maintain competitive parity, and include facets like salary caps, international slots and a hard limit on how many players can earn above the annual senior maximum salary (as negotiated with its players union in collective bargaining).
Other leagues in Concacaf aren’t curated in this way. Liga MX, in particular, benefits from its far more relaxed roster rules, with its clubs’ pull and historical prominence making it a marquee destination for many players on both sides of the Atlantic. Clubs like Club América, Monterrey and Tigres UANL could nearly fill a starting lineup of players exceeding MLS’s senior maximum salary. As such, the talent on-hand has kept Liga MX in the regional driver’s seat, winning 18 of the 19 most recent Concacaf Champions Cups.
The one exception came in 2022, when the Seattle Sounders bested UNAM in the final. It was the culmination of one era for the club, one that saw the team win MLS Cup in 2016 and 2019 while finishing as runner-up in 2017 and 2020. That club earned its place among the region’s elite across years of coming through on big stages.
All of which made it more notable, then, that the latter-stage storylines of the 2025 Concacaf Champions League were told with Miami at its fore. For all of the talent on the roster and the global pull that has followed, Miami had not backed up that reputation with results. That 2023 Leagues Cup was a highly entertaining oddity, the launch year of a competition that saw every game played in MLS stadiums, with both Messi and every Liga MX opponent learning how to navigate each round on the fly.
The Supporters’ Shield is a good indicator of each season’s greatest team, but the trophy doesn’t have the same caché as MLS Cup. To wit, MLS itself didn’t officially recognize the Supporters’ Shield as a major trophy until its fourth season, in 1999. When FIFA president Gianni Infantino crashed last year’s presentation after a Miami win, the decision to use the Shield as justification to include Miami (and Messi) in the 2025 Club World Cup was met with derision.
However, Miami would be forgiven for thinking they’d found a lucky break in the bracket. Although the Vancouver Whitecaps have been the league’s best team to date this season, this was another team operating under MLS’s roster guidelines. With the two semifinalists from Liga MX facing each other, even the top-ranked team in their own league was perhaps built from a more level standing. And besides, they didn’t have Messi; their headliners were far more anonymous domestic players, like Brian White and Sebastian Berhalter.
Well, reputation and bona fides only get one so far in a street fight. The Whitecaps were motivated for the task at hand, with coach Jesper Sørenson instilling belief in his players to back themselves against any opponent. When Miami failed to equalize before halftime, Vancouver still had the advantage in the series with just 45 minutes left to retain it. The visitors scored twice and never looked back.
“What we didn’t expect was to be knocked out of the tournament by two moments right after halftime,” Mascherano said on Wednesday night. “We should’ve been more composed. We were only one goal down, we’d done the hard part by scoring first, and what was needed then was calm, calculated football. But that’s not how it played out.
“Football, especially in semifinals, is about details. When you make small mistakes, teams at this level—teams that are in a semifinal for a reason—will punish you. And that’s what happened tonight, clearly.”
While Mascherano referred to Miami as “a young club” in his press conference, it’s worth remembering that both teams were relatively untested at this stage of continental play. It was Miami’s first Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal, but Vancouver’s only appearance at this stage (and no further) came in 2016 — a year when a 15-year-old named Alphonso Davies was just making his senior debut.
For both clubs, reaching the final would have represented a historical first, let alone winning it all. Now, that’s the Whitecaps’ trend to buck. Miami is left to focus on MLS.
Javier Mascherano faces extra scrutiny after Miami’s latest disappointment. (Chris Arjoon / Getty Images)
“We have to move forward,” Mascherano said. “Right now, our main focus is the MLS. I’m not even thinking about the Club World Cup yet—we’ve still got a month and a half before that. It would be a major mistake to shift our attention there now. All that matters at this moment is the league.
“Yes, we won the Leagues Cup, but we know the most prestigious tournament in the Concacaf region is the Champions Cup. We wanted to establish ourselves among the best. But sometimes, you have to admit when the opponent played the better hand. Tonight, we couldn’t beat them—they won more individual battles, more one-on-ones—and that tells the story of this match.”
While Mascherano is a first-year club head coach, he inherited with immense expectations. The roster has been finely curated to acclimate Messi at this stage of his career, with friendly veterans who’ve played alongside him and youthful players around them to do the hard yards. He’s made a couple of crucial changes to last year’s Shield side. Before the opening match, he dropped longtime starting goalkeeper Drake Callender for 38-year-old Oscar Ustari. He also left Julian Gressel, a two-time MLS Cup winner who trailed only Messi and Jordi Alba for chances created in 2024, out of his 20-man squad entirely. The veteran was waived by the club after they were unable to trade him, with Minnesota United eagerly claiming him and highly promoting his arrival.
For all of the chopping and changing, the story of Miami’s season will still be defined by its headliners. Messi has now gone four straight games (in MLS and Concacaf) without a goal contribution. Luis Suarez hasn’t scored in his last nine games, all of which were starts. Both legends of the game are valuable designated players, two of three possible players above the salary limit who often make or break a team’s chances in the biggest moments of a season. Miami would be forgiven for not expecting two of the modern era’s most prolific big-game players to not make such a difference — but that’s the hand Mascherano was dealt at this stage.
So now, it’s up to Miami to back up its reputation and the changes from last year’s squad with results. As Mascherano said, another Leagues Cup won’t do it. Nor, likely, will defending the Supporters Shield. In order to be “among the best,” it means winning the biggest competitions on offer.
MLS Cup is roughly seven months away. Perhaps no team is more desperate to win it and change their big-game reputation than the side with the league’s biggest stars.
(Top photo: Chris Arjoon / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)