Lionel Messi returns to LA for showdown with Sonny

The last time Los Angeles witnessed Lionel Messi in person, it felt like a comet ripping across the California sky — brilliant, fleeting, almost unfair.

That was back in September 2023.

Thankfully, on Saturday night, the comet returns.

MLS Opening Night at BMO Stadium delivers Messi’s only scheduled visit to Los Angeles this season, as Los Angeles Football Club hosts Inter Miami CF in a clash that feels less like a league fixture and more like a global summit. The league’s reigning champion walks back into a city that has always understood stardom — and demands it.

Messi doesn’t just visit markets anymore. He transforms them.

Since arriving in Miami in 2023, he has flipped the franchise on its axis — from afterthought to empire. A Supporters’ Shield. A Leagues Cup. An MLS Cup title in 2025. Packed stadiums in every ZIP code across the country — and Canada.

Messi has Inter Miami’s valuation soaring. The soon-to-open Miami Freedom Park, a billion-dollar monument to ambition, might as well have a sign outside that says: “This stadium is brought to you by Messi.”

And still, at 38, he plays like a man insulted by the passage of time.

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He presses. He hunts. He doesn’t drift through matches collecting applause like he’s on a farewell tour. He manufactures his own endings. In the 2025 MLS Cup Final, when the match turned tight and tense, it was Messi who initiated the defensive turnover that cracked Vancouver open. The stat sheet will remember assists and goals. The trophies will last forever.

But when he arrives in Los Angeles this weekend, the city is not coming to worship him. They’re coming to test him.

Across the pitch stands Son Heung-min, LAFC’s Korean megastar, a global icon in his own right and the most electrifying addition MLS has seen since Messi himself. For the first time, Messi and Son share an MLS field — two continents colliding under the LA lights.

Son joked in December that he “let Messi win this year, but next year … we’ll be at the top.” Jokes are funny until they become prophecy.

LAFC believes it is one of the few clubs constructed to stare Miami down without blinking. We’ll find out on Saturday night. 

Yet the night, the stage, still bends toward Messi.

Because when Messi touches down in Los Angeles, he’s stepping into the City of Champions. The Dodgers are back-to-back World Series champions. The Lakers hang banners like laundry on a line. The city is full of legends. LA knows how to measure myth against reality, and Messi, more often than not, exceeds both. 

This is his only scheduled appearance here in 2026. One night. One chance to watch the greatest player in soccer history orchestrate a match in person, not through a screen or a highlight package, but right in front of your eyes. 

Los Angeles will show up — not merely to see if Son can dethrone him, not merely to gauge whether LAFC can match Miami’s rising empire — but to feel that familiar electricity again. The hush before the free kick. The collective inhale. The impossible angle bending into inevitability.

Messi doesn’t visit often.

But when he does, cities remember.