HARRISON, N.J. – The sun was beginning to set as thousands clad in pink jerseys settled into their seats, hoping to see a show. The wait was not particularly long – with Lionel Messi temporarily a member of a captive audience, 17-year-old midfielder Adri Mehmeti made World Cup winner Rodrigo de Paul march to the beat of his drum. Red Bull New York were up on reigning MLS Cup champions Inter Miami seconds later thanks to a Casemiro own goal, the lead fully deserved.
Adri Mehmeti starts it with some filthy tekkers 😱
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) October 24, 2026
Julian Hall opens the scoring against @InterMiamiCF! pic.twitter.com/sufccNHZub
A moment of brilliance from a rising local star is now a weekly occurrence in MLS, especially from those who took part in the U.S. men's national team's generational shift-themed friendlies this fall. It was perhaps one of few guarantees on Saturday, the main one being Messi's presence. He was the reason, after all, that Sports Illustrated Stadium was actually full, this time with spectators who jumped out of concession lines in the 56th minute to see Messi enter the pitch. He's the person whose name is chanted more often than any of the home team's players by a very healthy margin, no matter the MLS stadium. It's the kind of request Inter Miami always feel obliged to grant because of his inexplicable excellence, even if he was in Oviedo, Spain, two days earlier to accept the Princess of Asturias award for sport. The appetite for Messi is insatiable in that way, to the point that the vast majority of people in the building believed he would flip the game on its head in a single moment.
It never happened.
Miami fell flat in a 2-0 defeat to the Red Bulls, who precariously sit in the final playoff position with three games to go. The 16 points and six places that separate them in the Eastern Conference indicated that Miami would at least assert themselves at times on Saturday, but they failed to make a dent in more ways than one. Mehmeti's ability to outperform De Paul for the game's opening goal set the tone for the evening in a lot of ways, losing the game as soon as they lost the midfield battle. It was not that they lacked the opportunity to impose themselves – they had 65.9% possession, took 906 touches and completed 86.3% of their 714 passes. That possession never translated to an actual ability to dominate the game, their performance disjointed and ineffective in the end.
"Our build-up play from the back was slow, and we lost possession in areas where we simply cannot afford to lose the ball," Miami head coach Cristian "Kily" Gonzalez said post-match. "Because of these turnovers — whether due to poor passing, bad touches, or other errors — we ended up being caught too spread out as a team. I don't want to take any credit away from our opponent, but I believe the main issue was our own failure to maintain the style of play that defines us — specifically, avoiding so many turnovers in the midfield. We were also caught out by passes played behind our lines and we weren't compact enough. We improved a little bit after halftime, but I'm certainly not satisfied. We're in a phase where we cannot afford to relax — not even for a moment — or else we'll face serious consequences. We weren't the best team before, and we certainly aren't the worst now; we just need to get back to our usual way of playing and regain our rhythm."
The Red Bulls are hardly the team one would expect to exploit Miami's weaknesses, notably ineffective in their own way. The 2-0 scoreline was generous to Miami, the hosts wasteful with 19 shots and 3.24 expected goals, the likes of Julian Hall and Jorge Ruvalcaba missing sitter after sitter. It is not much of a surprise for a team that ranks inside MLS' top five for expected goals with 57.02 but has just 41 goals to show for it but even then, they succeeded fully in exploiting Miami's weaknesses. Mehmeti's outing, one of the best of his young career, was the foundation for a Red Bulls performance, particularly in a dominant first half.
"Honestly, the maturity he has is unbelievable," the Red Bulls' Mohammed Sofo said. "The vision he has – he knows when to play for it, when to come down. Sometimes he does things, I'm like, 'Wow.' For me as a No. 8 or also as a No. 10, I try to find myself in the pockets and sometimes he finds me with just two touches. Other players need to take a first touch, look for it and then play but for him, from the second touch, he finds you."
Mehmeti's excellence allowed the Red Bulls to survive even once Messi entered the game.
"We all know how good he is," Red Bulls coach Michael Bradley said. "We all know how special he is. I said last week, for me, he's the best player of all time but I also know that you don't want to let really good players just do whatever they want and to just back off and admire the qualities, that doesn't get you what you want so you know that he's going to be able to twist and turn and dribble through tight spaces and find his way out of a certain spot. You know that he's going to be able to play certain passes but we still talked and worked all week on the idea of making the game really hard, not just on Miami but on Messi in particular and again in the middle of all that, there's still going to be certain plays but we wanted the first guy ready to close down and take away the direct path to goal. We wanted the second guy coming ready every single time on the inside. We wanted in certain moments a third guy ready, close and so that part was generally good when he came on and so I was more pleased with that part."
Messi, of course, did what he could to help Miami but at 39 years old and after two transatlantic flights in a handful of days, the spark was not there. He was hardly at his freshest, generating 0.13 expected goals plus expected assists and creating two chances along the way. Miami looked a bit better as a whole after his arrival, generating 0.51 expected goals from five shots. It was technically an improvement from the 0.3 expected goals they mustered in the 55 minutes before Messi's substitution but for a title-contending team, the results were not impressive in the slightest.
This, of course, is not Messi's fault. He is the perfect, and perhaps only, player a team can build an entire strategy around. Even on the days where he is mostly absent, he can still turn up – only three months have passed since Messi was kept at bay in a World Cup semifinal for 85 minutes, only to notch two assists and send Argentina to the final. It is genuinely worth asking if that approach is actually a sustainable one, though. There was only going to be so much gas in the tank of a team fueled by Messi – and for that matter, Luis Suarez – in the final years of their careers. Miami won MLS Cup last year with their help but also with an actual plan by ex-head coach Javier Mascherano, who was out of a job four months later.
Gonzalez, who had a 32.5% win percentage in a coaching career that had only consisted of jobs in Argentina before Miami hired him in late summer, has not found the solutions to Miami's problems. If three wins in seven games was not enough for Mascherano to keep his job, Gonzalez's identical record is not much better. Miami, though, look more aimless now than they have since Messi joined the club three years ago and are running out of time for Gonzalez to fix it before the playoffs begin next month.
In a team sport, Miami's problems might just be too big for Messi to solve all by himself.
Mehmeti's breakout season continues
While fans fill stadiums to see the likes of Messi, LAFC's Son Heung-min and the Chicago Fire's Robert Lewandowski, they are often treated to something else entirely these days – a teenager doing what he can to leave a strong impression. Mehmeti did just that on Saturday, an appropriate feat for a freshly-capped USMNT player who has been the talk of MLS sporting executives for some time. Bradley was quick to remind, though, that his quick rise is impressive even if his potential was easy to spot.
"He has personality," Bradley said. "He has technical ability, the technical ability that you need to play in that spot in the center of the field when spaces are tight and things happen fast. He has a feel and an understanding for the game and obviously, the way things have gone this year, we've thrown an incredible amount at him. I've also said this a bunch of times. I didn't know coming into the season what exactly it was going to mean for Adri, or Julian, or Matty dos Santos, or any of our young guys. We knew that they were going to be a real part of the first team and in the end, it was going to be we were going to see how things played out, how they responded every day, how they took to ideas, how they pushed themselves along in the group, how they earned respect and the way it has gone means that we have put a lot on Adri's plate. We expect a lot of him. He has a lot of responsibility in our team for a 17-year-old, and he doesn't bat an eye."
Mehmeti's strong outing against Miami came after two games where he was substituted off before the hour mark, all on the back of a first camp with the U.S. team where his international teammates popped off more than he did. Growth is hardly linear, though, especially for a 17-year-old in the midst of his first season as a professional.
"Are there things that need to continue to improve? Yeah, absolutely," Bradley said. "Have there been certain games where, for this reason or that reason, we end up feeling like no, tonight's a night where we got to make a change and get him off a little bit earlier? Yeah, there have been but generally speaking, when you talk about a 17-year-old kid who has played in that spot on our team and when you think about the way that we play and what gets asked of him in that role, he's doing really well."
Mehmeti's settings are ideal as he continues to chart an upward trajectory. USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino has described MLS as a strong place for young players to begin their professional careers, while Bradley himself will have plenty of insight to offer Mehmeti. The Red Bulls head coach was once the celebrated midfield engine of the USMNT, the former national team captain winning 151 caps and playing in two World Cups during his career.
"I just think the full package has improved in every way," he said about Mehmeti's progress this season. "He has taken the qualities that he has and has made them hold up as games get better and harder and faster and as opponents get that much better and within that, there are little things that need to continue to get better. We've talked a little bit lately about his understanding in certain situations when we can't be aggressive or when it's not a real counter-pressing moment and he has to then slide out a little bit on an angle and deal with an attack or just his understanding of how to take a good angle and make sure that he can control that situation so it doesn't turn into anything more dangerous and so as I said, these are all normal things that when you're a young player playing in that position and there is that much responsibility, you have to live it. You have to play through it. You have to make certain mistakes so that you understand, 'I can't do that exactly the same way again,' and so he's moving himself forward in a really good way."