One of the coldest professional matches in recorded history is set to go down Wednesday night. Lionel Messi and Inter Miami travel to Kansas City to face Sporting KC in the first round of the Concacaf Champions Cup. It marks preliminary action for the 2025 soccer campaign, but the blustering winter weather is far more befitting of the Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes. This should be sufficiently weird.
How to watch Inter Miami at Sporting Kansas City
Concacaf pushed this match back by a day after Tuesday’s forecast called for 3-to-5 inches of snowfall in the area. Weird weather is nothing new to MLS teams — lightning strikes in Houston postponed a match and LAFC played Real Salt Lake in a blizzard, both last season — but it is a striking development for a league that now employs one of the most decorated players in the history of sport.
Cold weather scheduling is still something the MLS has to deal with. The MLS regular season starts this weekend.
“It is laughable,” LAFC coach Steve Cherundolo said last year after that blizzard match in Salt Lake City. “It just baffles me that we would put players through this. I didn’t even watch the game for the last 20 minutes. You couldn’t see anything.”
Is Messi about to play in what could be the coldest soccer match on record?
The elder statesman Messi has 21 goals and 18 assists in 25 regular-season MLS matches. His star-heavy Miami squad also has Barcelona luminaries Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets and Luis Suárez. Former Barça midfielder Javier Mascherano makes his official coaching debut Wednesday, after the club went 4-0-1 in five preseason fixtures.
Sporting KC brought in 2024 MLS champ Dejan Joveljić from the LA Galaxy and added Spaniards Joaquín Fernández and Manu García in the offseason. Kansas City is still at a disadvantage talent-wise, but the brutal weather could completely warp how things play out. Growing up in Argentina and playing in Spain, Messi has seldom been exposed to matches in weather like this.
Wednesday is the first leg of the Champions Cup’s first round, with Miami hosting next week for the second leg. The winner of the series goes on to the Round of 16. Each knockout round has two legs until the final.
Last year’s tournament ended with Mexico’s Pachuca topping the MLS’ Columbus Crew 3-0. Fellow Liga MX club León beat Los Angeles FC 3-1 over two legs in 2023. A Mexican club has won this tournament, in its various iterations, nearly every year since 2005. The Seattle Sounders were the exception with their victory in 2022. MLS teams have made some progress by having a team in the final in four of the past five years.
Miami was knocked out in the quarterfinals of this competition last year. This is Sporting’s first appearance in this tournament since 2019, when KC made it to the semifinals.
(Photo of Lionel Messi: Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
