How Lionel Messi's Publix run mirrors Best and Cruyff's 'rewarding' time in U.S. (2024)

The Athletic has live coverage of Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami debut.

It took less than three days in Miami for Lionel Messi to take his first steps toward becoming a true Floridian.

On Thursday night, the Argentine great was pictured at Publix, a regional supermarket chain adored by Floridians past and present. A few fans and curiosity-seekers grabbed selfies with Messi as he cruised the aisles of the store with his wife Antonella and his two young sons. His haul, the photos show, included a box of Lucky Charms (that’s a cereal, for any non-Americans reading).

Casual 🐐 sighting at Publix.

Lionel Messi is a Florida Man, confirmed.

(via @Rosariotres, @FCBAlbiceleste) pic.twitter.com/3MubCH9RDM

— Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports) July 14, 2023

It should be noted that Publix is a corporate sponsor of Inter Miami, the MLS club for which Messi is expected to sign officially soon. But that’s done little to dampen the impression that this was a rare and endearing “everyman” moment from one of the greatest players of all time.

In nearly every photo taken on Thursday, Messi looks at peace and unbothered; a far cry from his life in Paris, Barcelona or elsewhere, where every venture into the public eye brought a throng of press photographers and hundreds of adoring fans. Clips of Messi leaving restaurants in Argentina look borderline scary, replete with the type of hysterics normally reserved for pop stars and cult leaders.

Soccer players in the United States have long enjoyed this level of tranquility. Even truly legendary players — Johan Cruyff, George Best, Thierry Henry and the like —have enjoyed some level of anonymity during their U.S. club careers. And while it’s simply impossible that Messi will have a normal life in Miami by the standards of the general public, the Argentine likely hopes his life in the Sunshine State will simply achieve a degree of relative normalcy.

In other locales, a trip to the local market would’ve resulted in a riot. In Florida, it just results in a half-dozen selfies.

With his moppish haircut and boyish good looks, George Best was probably the very first “celebrity footballer.” The Northern Irishman cemented his spot in Manchester United lore when he led the club to a European Cup in 1968, only a handful of years after the club suffered the tragedy of the Munich air disaster.

That success —and Best’s own charm —made him a frequent target for press photographers. He was the first player anywhere in the world whose movements became front-page news, and he was stalked throughout London during his time there.

Some of this attention, of course, was welcomed. Best appeared on the seminal TV show “Top of the Pops” and became one of the first footballers to turn pitchman, shilling everything from breakfast sausages, to eggs, to boots. He dated models and rubbed shoulders with celebrities and oftentimes didn’t make any attempt at all to shield himself from public view.

Things had changed drastically by the time he arrived at the North American Soccer League’s Fort Lauderdale Strikers in 1978. His erratic behavior had cost him his job at Manchester United and Best was in the middle of a wayward journey towards retirement. Stays in Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere in the United States had ended poorly. Best remained a singular talent on the field, fully capable of conjuring up magic at any given point in time. But he was also unreliable, frequently failing to turn up for training sessions and sometimes criticizing his own teammates in the press.

He was also entirely done with the idea of being a celebrity. Best’s family had a history of alcoholism and his own drinking started in earnest during his time at Manchester United, when the pressures of playing for the club, along with the constant temptation of being in the limelight, had forced him towards the bottle.

In Fort Lauderdale, though, Best found peace. There were no prying eyes to speak of. The NASL, which was formed in 1967 and would fold in the mid-80s, was growing in popularity but was still a no-name league compared to the NFL or Major League Baseball. Soccer as a whole remained a fringe sport in the U.S., largely unavailable on television and covered sparingly by print journalists.

“George was happy just to get away from the UK, where everyone stuck a camera in face, to live in (The U.S.) where he was essentially anonymous,” said Ken Adam, Best’s agent in the United States. “How do you put a price on that? He would have played for free, honestly.”

Fellow British ex-pat and Strikers midfielder Ray Hudson had already been in Fort Lauderdale for a year when Best arrived in 1978, and he’d already fallen in love with it. He’d been hard at work soaking up the sun and enjoying all of the amenities the area had to offer, and he’d purchased an Italian sports car to boot.

Best went in a different direction.

“Bestie had a Jeep (CJ7),” said Hudson. “And George was out there shirtless, taking the doors off, putting them in the back, dropping the top down, putting it in the back, pushing the windscreen down onto the hood. I asked him ‘what the hell are you doing?’ And he says to me ‘Ray, I f—ing love this place. I love it. I can drive around like this and nobody even f—ing looks.”

In England, cruising to training in his Jaguar E-Type, Best had been tailed by photographers, mobbed the second he stepped out of the car at Old Trafford. At Lockhart Stadium, the inconspicuous ground that used to occupy the plot of land where Inter Miami’s DRV PNK Stadium sits today, there wasn’t a paparazzo in sight.

“I think he was free,” said Hudson. “He was just a free spirit and here in this country he found the closest part of that, his truest form.”

Best’s celebrity could still show itself at times, though never intentionally, according to his U.S. teammates. Jimmy McAllister, who played with Best during his time at the San Jose Earthquakes (his final stop in the U.S.) remembered a car ride with Best in 1980. The two were listening to the radio when news of John Lennon’s murder crackled into the broadcast. “The boy with the Beatle haircut,” as he’d been called in London, grew somber.

“I’ll have to give Yoko a call,” said Best.

By the time Johan Cruyff arrived in Washington in 1980, his celebrity had nearly cost him his life.

By 1977, Cruyff was widely-regarded as one of the game’s all-time greats, a prolific midfielder whose singular focus on playing “total football” had earned him the respect of die-hards and the adulation of the game’s everyday fans as well. After winning everything there was to win at Dutch side Ajax, Cruyff became an idol at Barcelona and planted the seeds of the club’s future tactical identity.

His profile had earned him his share of admirers, but it also attracted opportunists. In an interview with Radio Catalunya in 2008, Cruyff, who passed away in 2016, recalled the reason for his departure from Camp Nou.

“You should know that I had problems at the end of my career as a player here,” he said. “Someone [put] a rifle at my head and tied me up and tied up my wife in front of the children at our flat in Barcelona.”

Cruyff and his family escaped the harrowing attempt and spent the next four months protected by a police detail. His children were accompanied to school by armed guards, while Cruyff himself arrived at training sessions alongside a bodyguard. A year later, he was conspicuously absent from Holland’s side at the 1978 World Cup. For years, it was presumed that the famously hard-headed Dutchman had a falling out with the Dutch federation. In reality, Cruyff, said, it was his decision not to play. “You value things differently after you go through something like that,” he said.

Cruyff was still among the world’s best when he arrived in Los Angeles a year later. A few poor investments had cost him a chunk of his fortune and the NASL had by then become an ideal landing spot for European legends looking for a last-chance payday. He was the league’s MVP in 1979, but when the L.A. Aztecs were sold to a Mexican ownership group, Cruyff found himself shipped cross-country to Washington.

His time with the Washington Diplomats afforded him the anonymity he’d craved for years. Thomas Rongen, who currently serves as Inter Miami’s radio analyst, was a young teammate of Cruyff’s at the time and, improbably, lived in the Dutch legend’s basem*nt in D.C.. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while Rongen found an apartment, but it lasted for months.

Far from the glare of Europe, Cruyff was able to live in relative anonymity in the U.S. capital, even if his stately Georgetown residence was tucked in amongst some of the city’s power players. Rongen remembers riding alongside his idol as the two descended into the city, at times making the three-mile trek to RFK Stadium on bicycles.

It feels beyond belief, but it’s true. In Barcelona, Cruyff had purchased a pair of massive dobermans, largely to help protect him and his family. In D.C., Rongen remembered, they became common house pets.

“It was an incredible experience,” said Rongen. “Johan would rave about his time in the U.S. You can’t even imagine how big his profile was in the rest of the world and (in D.C.,) he could walk down the street and nobody would recognize him. In the time I spent (living with the Cruyffs), we would go out for dinner almost every night, because they never could do that in Barcelona, they just couldn’t. They had to have bodyguards.”

Cruyff immersed himself in life in America. He taught soccer clinics for children before road matches and recorded a segment for the local news every week, where he’d attempt to educate an audience of Americans (most of whom would never even recognize him) about the finer points of football. He left the country for good in 1981, but credits his time in the NASL with developing his knowledge of the business and promotional sides of the game.

He also credits it with restoring a bit of sanity to his life after such a traumatic spell in Barcelona.

“America gave me three beautiful, instructive seasons with the Aztecs and Diplomats,” Cruyff wrote in his memoir, My Turn. “During which I was able to take stock of my life. It was an enormously rewarding time.”

Best and Cruyff were legendary players, but fame wise, they likely don’t hold a candle to Lionel Messi. The Argentine’s peak years coincided with an era where media itself proliferated, where information became available instantly in every corner of the globe. The few Americans who even knew of Best or Cruyff’s exploits in Europe grew up watching their highlights on closed-circuit TV, or in film compilations. Messi’s adoring legions grew up watching every minute of his career on cell phones, tablets and televisions, in real-time.

Maybe the only real analog to Messi’s arrival in the States is the arrival of Pele in 1975. Arguably still the greatest player in the history of the sport, Pele joined the New York Cosmos with a singular mission: sell the game of soccer in the United States. Every moment of his tenure with the Cosmos was a madhouse, from his debut, where fans lined nearby bridges and expressways to get a glimpse of the action in the stadium, to his send-off match, where 77,000 watched him say goodbye to an illustrious career.

He did every talk show, every appearance. He started a children’s camp and, for years, stayed on campus with his campers, frequently taking part in training sessions with them. Talk to any of his Cosmos teammates and they will all tell you the same thing: Pele never got any real peace in the United States.

He also never appeared to want any. Those same teammates will tell you about his unfailing drive when it came to his work as a soccer emissary.

It’s unclear how much stock Messi himself will put into “selling the game of soccer in America.” It’s a phrase that’s existed for decades in the U.S., but it probably means less nowadays than it ever has. Soccer as a whole seems to have made it already, with thousands waking up at the wee hours to catch games from overseas, and millions more supporting the national teams.

Messi, then, will have more time to wander the streets, or see the sights, or do anything any normal resident of this country does. Like going to the supermarket.

Can he continue to do that in peace? That remains to be seen. Even at the height of his fame, though, America seems likely to afford Messi a level of relative anonymity that he’d never be able to attain in Spain, France, Argentina or elsewhere.

(Top photo: Mike Hewitt – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)