How Messi’s Inter Miami Contract Was Built

A salary the league wouldn’t allow, split between the club, Apple and Adidas

SOCCER

9/9/20264 min read

MLS puts a limit on how much each team can spend on salaries. In 2025 it was $5.95 million for the whole roster. Messi had a guaranteed salary of around $20.4 million a year, according to the salary guide published by the players’ union. In other words, he earned more than three times what the league lets a team spend on its entire squad. Under the rules as written, he didn’t fit at any club.

And even so, those $20 million were only part of it. The rest came in through other doors.

It’s what happens at a lot of companies with rigid pay bands. When they want to hire someone worth far more than the scale allows, they don’t raise the salary. Instead they offer commission on the business that person brings in, company stock and a package that never shows up on the payroll. That, at Messi scale, is what was put together in Miami.

A league that caps itself

MLS doesn’t work like European football. It’s a league with a salary cap, designed so that no club runs away from the rest and all of them stay competitive and viable. The exception has a famous name: the Designated Player rule, created in 2007 so that David Beckham could come over. Each club can have up to three of these players, and only a fixed portion of their salary counts against the cap ($743,750 in 2025). The club pays the rest outside the cap.

The rule opens the door, but it doesn’t solve the problem. By Sportico’s estimates, Inter Miami brought in around $56 million in 2022. Paying Messi what he was reported to cost, up to $60 million a year, out of club money alone would have meant committing the club’s entire revenue to one player. Someone else had to come to the table.

The Beckham clause

To understand who came to that table, you have to go back to the first Designated Player in history. When Beckham signed with the LA Galaxy in 2007, his contract included an unusual option: he could later buy an MLS expansion team at a price set back then, $25 million. At the time it looked like a perk to keep him happy.

In 2014 he exercised the option and chose Miami. By then, getting into the league already cost a lot more: in 2015, the new clubs paid $100 million. Then came four years of fighting for a stadium, partners coming and going and sites falling through. The club was officially approved in 2018 and played its first match in 2020.

The man who made the Designated Player rule possible ended up as the owner who used it to bring in Messi.

The engineering

What was reported in the summer of 2023, mainly by Sportico and Front Office Sports, was a package with four parts:

Club salary: the wage paid by Inter Miami.
Apple: a share of the revenue from new subscriptions to MLS Season Pass, the service Apple used to stream every match.
Adidas: a share of revenue from the brand, which supplies kits to the whole league and has sponsored Messi for years.
Equity: the option to take a stake in the club once he stopped playing.

Jorge Mas, Inter Miami’s co-owner, went as far as saying the Apple agreement was very important to closing the signing.

Seen from each side, everyone had a reason to sign. Apple had a ten-year deal with the league, reported to be worth around $2.5 billion, and needed people to pay to watch it. Adidas would sell shirts across the continent. The league knew Messi would fill opposing stadiums too. And the club got a player it couldn’t afford on its own. Each party put in money for what it gained from him, not as a favor.

What was confirmed, which is very little

It’s worth separating what is known from what was reported:

The signing: Inter Miami announced it in July 2023, with a contract through 2025 and no figures.
The salary: the players’ union guide lists a base salary of $12 million and guaranteed compensation of around $20.4 million per season.
The extension: in October 2025, Messi extended through the end of the 2028 season, again with no figures.
What the owner said: the most concrete statement came in March 2026, when Mas told Bloomberg he pays him “$70 to $80 million a year,” all things included.
What was never published: the terms with Apple and Adidas, neither by them nor by the club.

Everything else about how the money is split comes from press reports.

What happened next

The impact could be measured, though with caveats here too:

Subscriptions: according to the Sports Business Journal, Season Pass had around a million subscribers before Messi. Mas said they doubled after his debut, and the same outlet reported that the year ended with more than two million. Apple has never confirmed its numbers.
Tickets: resale prices for Inter Miami matches jumped 1,700%, according to CNBC.
Shirts: Adidas described demand for the number 10 shirt as “unprecedented,” with orders delayed for months.
Sponsorships: Sportico revealed a curious detail. Several of the club’s sponsorship contracts included clauses that raised the payment if the team signed a player with multiple Ballon d’Or awards. They didn’t name anyone, but they didn’t need to.
Club value: according to Sportico, the club brought in around $200 million in 2025, compared with $56 million in 2022. Its valuation went from $585 million in 2022 to $1.45 billion in 2026, the highest in the league.

The mechanism has also had to adapt. In late 2025, Apple and MLS announced that Season Pass would disappear in 2026 and that matches would move into the general Apple TV subscription, with the deal cut short to 2029. It hasn’t been reported how that affects the part of Messi’s pay tied to subscriptions.

What doesn’t happen in Europe

In European football, the club pays and nobody else is at the table. When El Mundo published Messi’s Barcelona contract in 2021, around €555 million over four seasons, every cent of it came out of a single balance sheet. Months later, that same club couldn’t register him because LaLiga’s financial rules wouldn’t allow it.

In Miami, the opposite happened. The rules also prevented paying him, but instead of closing the door they forced the club to find everyone who would gain from his arrival and ask each of them to chip in. In the end it wasn’t a club signing a player, but an entire league making room.