Opinion: Messi craze at the National Sports Collectors Convention
The Argentine-born No. 10 is poised to conquer the North American market
Lionel Messi wants to be the biggest athlete who has ever lived.
Not the best soccer player ever, but the type of global icon like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, men who transcended sports and became part of world culture.
Messi’s signing with MLS side Inter Miami this summer is his way of conquering North America, a new market for him after playing in Europe his entire life. He’s off to a great start, scoring three goals in two games.
There are a few ways to gauge Messi’s popularity in the U.S. that go beyond counting how many of his replica Argentina jerseys you see people wearing on the street. One way is the sports cards and memorabilia market.
There’s no better way or place to do such a thing as at the National Sports Collectors Convention at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Chicago, a five-day bonanza where fans gather to buy and sell sports memorabilia. The annual convention runs through Sunday.
While baseball, basketball and football dominate the show, other sports such as hockey, boxing and golf are also featured. In recent years, soccer has been as well in the form of signed trading cards, jerseys and ticket stubs.
In recent years, collectors, especially younger ones, have shown an interest in soccer cards. While most fans around the world have been collecting stickers for decades, trading cards have grown in popularity.
Messi’s presence at this National in the form of collectables is a reflection of his growing popularity in this country. He dominates over the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe and even Pele, who played for the New York Cosmos and is justly credited with giving the game a much-needed boost starting in the mid-1970s.
Over the next three years, Messi isn’t only going to play in MLS. He will also play for Argentina at next summer’s Copa America and in 2026 when the U.S. co-hosts the World Cup with Canada and Mexico.
That’s a lot of Messi on American soil between now and 2026. Messi is 36 and won a World Cup last December. He’s got nothing else to prove. As Sports Illustrated recently noted:
His legacy will not be burnished by an MLS Cup nor tarnished by failure. But he can perhaps carve out future marketing opportunities in the U.S. Talk of him doing what Pele did for U.S. soccer in the 1970s is fanciful, if only because the base is so much higher. However, he could perhaps make soccer definitively the fourth-most popular sport in the country.
Messi brings attention and some glamour to MLS. He will also give scores of Americans the chance to see him play live. That will translate into nostalgia years from now. Nothing connects fans to the past more than memorabilia.
There are certainly more attendees this year donning Messi jerseys — most of them either from his time at Barcelona or Argentina. A few were spotted wearing Inter Miami shirts.
This year’s National features appearances by legends like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Reggie Jackson signing autographs. These were athletes that became cultural icons decades ago.
Whether Messi will be as big as Jordan and Ali remains to be seen. He could, however, very well be meeting fans and signing autographs at a National decades from now, the ultimate sign of a legacy that could include capturing the hearts and minds of Americans.