Apple’s belligerently dull Messi doc shows football’s change from sport to content

Well, this wasn’t quite how things were supposed to go.

Lionel Messi arrived in America three months ago preceded by a freight train of expectations. His impact was immediate. A perfect free kick to win the game in the final seconds of his first match. A blitz of goals in the weeks that followed, including a strike in the Leagues Cup final that had all the skipping, curling, edge-of-the-box razzle-dazzle of the master in his Barcelona pomp. Inter Miami’s first-ever trophy. A charge up the league table as he led his club, languishing at the foot of the MLS Eastern Conference when he got to Miami, in the race to secure a playoff berth. For those few, spacey weeks in late summer, as celebrities gawped and seal clapped from the stands while Messi merrily shredded the best defenses in America, it really did feel like soccer in this country would forever be divided, as Sergio Aguëro suggested, into two eras: Before Messi and After Messi.

In the MLS marketers’ dreams, the plan from there was clear: Messi would inspire Inter Miami to a spot in the playoffs, perhaps even a deep postseason run should MLS defenders continue to oblige. With every fresh swish of that holy left peg, soccer would win fresh hearts and minds in America.

But then, a month ago, the marketing plan suffered a fatal blow: Messi went off with a hamstring injury in the 37th minute of a league match against Toronto, and spent five of the following six matches watching glumly from the bench. His team’s form reverted to the mean, and Inter Miami failed to make the playoffs. With hopes of a Messi-decorated final snuffed out and the new season not starting until next spring, MLS suddenly faced the prospect of its star vehicle spending the coming four months idling in the garage.

Now what? Now this: a three-part documentary series about Messi’s first few months in America has dropped on Apple TV+, with a second tranche of episodes to land in November.

For American soccer fans bereft at the thought of surviving the Messi-less months to come, Messi Meets America promises the kind of deep succor that only press conference B-roll footage can offer. Even for a figure as special as Messi, releasing a documentary that celebrates a player’s first weeks in a new league feels about as premature as a person releasing an autobiography in their 20s.

On that score, Messi Meets America does not disappoint: it’s every bit as thin as you’d expect, a glorified advertisement that has been stretched out, in the manner of a medieval torture victim, over 90 excruciating minutes. For Apple TV+, I’m calling this an Apple TV minus.

It’s no surprise, I suppose, to see MLS’s sponsor network turn on the content spigot so soon after Messi’s arrival in America. Messi’s presence here was never about football alone; he’s the prime marketing asset in Apple TV+’s bid to attract viewers to its MLS Season Pass streaming service, and his own remuneration package is tied to new subscriptions. Messi’s value to MLS and Apple TV+ is not simply about what he does on the field; he’s a marketing widget, a brand that can be filmed, harnessed, repackaged and mobilized in the neverending wars of consumer engagement.

This is all part of a broader trend, of course. It is no longer enough for footballers to simply be footballers. Since the turn of the century, global soccer’s rise has been inextricably linked to the sport’s transformation into a media asset. The advent of streaming has sent that process into overdrive, creating a race to monetize every morsel of the sport into a televisual buffet to be snacked and gorged on at will.

The ultimate aim, of course, is to impel viewers to pay for live sport, but the marketing pitch is becoming more sophisticated, involving a galaxy of add-ons that promise to take us behind the scenes at the world’s biggest clubs and reveal the drama, conflict, and personalities that shape sporting dynasties. Soccer is no longer just a sport; increasingly it is “content” – cultural filler, empty calories to feed the repetitive tedium of life under algorithmic capitalism – as well. Enough about the game; how was the Netflix series?

“The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in 2020.

What’s true of music is also true of soccer, a sport increasingly run according to the perpetual demand for fresh material, for meat to feed into the online maw. Footballers, like the rest of us, are all content creators now. And right now, there’s no bigger influencer in world football than Leo Messi, the global game’s content GOAT.

Related: Is the cost of bringing Lionel Messi to MLS falling on fans?

There are countless ways in which Messi Meets America could have gone right. In theory, a documentary on Messi’s first few months in this country could offer fresh insight into MLS’s expansion plans, or tell us something new about this most reticent of athletic superstars. But Messi Meets America never aspires to be anything other than a dull marketing interstitial.

The ostensible backbone of the story is Inter Miami’s run to victory in the Leagues Cup, an achievement that felt genuinely miraculous and improbable in the moment but is reduced here to a joylessly chaotic mashup of highlights whose chief quality is to make it almost impossible to appreciate the true virtuosity of Messi in motion. (Apple TV+, you had one job.)

It already feels like the narrative has exhausted itself by the end of the first episode (quite why a 90-minute documentary needs to be broken into three parts is beyond me), and then in the second minute of the second episode comes confirmation that this is an exercise everyone would have been better off leaving on the DRV PNK Stadium ideas whiteboard: Inter Miami’s senior vice-president of brand and marketing, Michael Ridley, pops up on screen, raving about the explosive Messi-induced growth in the club’s social media following. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he enthuses. “The phones, the LinkedIns, the messages.” This might just be me, but I’d suggest that if your sports documentary includes any mention of LinkedIn, that’s probably a powerful sign it shouldn’t have been made.

Sport is supposed to provide an escape, not remind us of the hellscape of “wins” and “storytelling” that is the modern online workplace.

From there, the documentary’s remaining energy is spent impressing upon us what a good person Messi is: we’re told people love Messi because he ran over to his family on the sideline after scoring his first goal for Inter Miami (do they?), and there’s a particularly bizarre scene in which Spanish-language broadcaster Tony Cherchi obsequiously thanks Messi for his humility and for being an example in the world of sport.

This moralistic insistence on Messi’s virtue perhaps suits MLS’s family focus but nevertheless feels intensely irritating: who cares?

The supporting cast is there to purely make up the numbers. Jordi Alba, another new signing for Inter Miami, is shown repeatedly remarking on how good the level of play in MLS is (the lady doth protest too much), American soccer’s resident lolcow Fernando Fiore clowns about nonsensically for a bit, David Beckham meows about something or other, and the documentary reaches its dribbly end with some cliche stock footage of Miami: palm trees at dusk, medium-rise residential towers against a blue sky, a few cutaways of old guys eating empanadas, a random skateboarder or two, some accordion music to give a sense of local “color”.

Future episodes will not include Miami’s US Open Cup semi-final defeat to Houston, which Messi sat out. Perhaps because Apple does not own the rights to that tournament, or perhaps because a defeat doesn’t fit with the marketers’ emptily triumphalist narrative. To say the whole thing feels phoned in would be too generous; the makers of Messi Meets America texted it in.

They also, critically, appeared to take very little time to interview their primary subject, and this may be the chief defect of this particular documentary and MLS’s marketing plan more broadly: Messi is almost belligerently uninteresting away from the field. With the ball at his feet, he is, of course, without peer. But this is a man whose self-expression is channeled almost exclusively through his legs. Take the ball away and put him in front of a camera, and there’s not a whole lot to go on.

Related: João Cancelo commits cardinal sin in age of smartphone and transactional fandom | Jonathan Liew

This is not the case for other members of world football’s elite. Cristiano Ronaldo appeals to angry young men in a way that makes him a perfect foil for the Piers Morgans and Jordan Petersons of the world. Thierry Henry occupies the breakfast show armchairs with Gallic hauteur. Original Ronaldo rolls through Fifa events with the dadly geniality of someone who’d be fun at a barbecue. Zlatan is Zlatan. Messi has none of these players’ charisma or worldliness, which makes him fairly limp as an on-air talent. He’s closer in spirit to Zinedine Zidane – a gentle, bashful genius whose freakish ability is so totally directed through the interaction of football and feet that he always seems stunned at the idea of having to speak in public.

Quite how Apple TV+ and MLS manage their golden cow from here is anyone’s guess. What seems certain is there is a lot more Messi media to come, and all of it’s likely to be just as insipid as this inaugural effort, calcifying soccer’s cultural transition from sport to content, GOAT to bloat.

This is a shame, since there’s no reason why the contentification of soccer should not produce interesting TV. An Impossible Job, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and Asif Kapadia’s Maradona are among the sharpest, most engrossing sports documentaries ever made. And among the cream of today’s footballers, there’s surely a great well of talent waiting to be tapped, a golden crop of talent in need of form and direction.

The dentition of Bobby Firmino and Jürgen Klopp deserves an Amazon series in its own right (“Incisors: All Or Nothing”). Mo Salah strikes me as someone with great potential as an on-screen physical comedian. Erling Haaland’s laddish menace marks him out as a promising future Bond villain. I’d love to see a 12-part documentary series directed by Charlie Kaufman called Being Ben White.

The possibilities are endless; the sport can thrive without being witlessly marketed to within an inch of its life. In the meantime, there’s Messi Meets America.