Kevin Baxter: MLS can't afford to fumble its Messi moment and must make bold changes now

LOS ANGELES — The two most powerful men in MLS were in the building Sunday when Lionel Messi brought Inter Miami’s traveling circus into Dignity Health Sports Park.

Messi was on the field, where he scored the tying goal in a 1-1 draw with the Galaxy. Don Garber, the league’s commissioner and the other half of that powerful pair, watched the game from AEG’s corporate suite.

In his short time in MLS, Messi has pushed the league to new levels of revenue, interest and awareness. Inter Miami sells out wherever it plays, Royal Caribbean is giving the team more than $22 million for the shirts on their backs and the number of subscribers to the streaming service that broadcasts MLS games has more than doubled since Messi’s arrival.

Turns out having the best player in the history of the sport join your league can be a transformational moment.

“You’ve got to keep getting top players,” Galaxy coach Greg Vanney said, “because that’s what people want to see.”

Who knew?

Well, everybody actually, because we’ve seen this before. And that’s where Garber comes in.

The season before Michael Jordan entered the NBA in 1984, no team drew as many as 16,000 fans a game. Last season, no NBA team drew fewer than 16,000. With help from Nike, Jordan became a global brand as much as he was a player and the NBA, under then-commissioner David Stern, followed suit. The league expanded from 23 to 30 teams, began playing and televising games overseas and revenue exploded, from $118 million in 1982-83 to $10.58 billion last season.

The NBA says the Brooklyn Nets alone have 53.6 million overseas fans and the league’s TV rights outside the U.S. are twice as valuable as the NFL’s, according to Ampere Analysis.

The NHL can’t match that, but it had its own transformational moment when the Kings acquired Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers in 1988. Gretzky already held the league’s single-season records for goals, assists and points when he came to L.A., joining a franchise that had enjoyed just four winning seasons in 21 years.

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