The Billionaire Who Brought Messi To Miami

Miami is a fantastic city. It's beautiful, you know, we have ocean, sun, heat, and it's just a great lifestyle, great lifestyle for our kids. It's safe, great for business. So, you know, Miami's it. Jorge Mas is one of the most prominent Cuban-American businessmen in the United States. He's the chairman of MasTech, which is a publicly traded infrastructure, engineering, and construction firm. And also, Jorge Mas has become one of the most influential figures in American soccer with what he's done as the managing owner of InterMiami. So when Mas joins the InterMiami ownership group back in 2019, he decides from day one, I want Miami to be a city of stars. We're gonna go out and target the best players on earth. And Messi, right away, was right at the top of his list. I look at it as we're stewards. That's the team, that's Miami's team, that's my fans' teams, but what a blessing. And really being able to, I think, make a mark and make a difference, not only in South Florida, but for the sport of soccer in the United States, for us, is a tremendous blessing. So back when David Beckham came over to play in Major League Soccer in 2007, in order to bring him over, they needed to offer him a unique deal. And one of the elements of that deal was they gave him an option to start an expansion team for $25 million. So Beckham's career goes on. When he's done, he exercises that option. And they, at some point, one way or another, they decide, okay, we wanna target Miami as the market. So Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber decides it would really help this effort and make it stronger if we had a strong local partner involved. And who better than Jorge Mas? Born and raised in Miami, prominent Cuban-American businessman, very popular in the community, very successful. So he cold calls Jorge Mas and says, Jorge, are you interested in being involved with the Miami MLS project? Mas hesitates at first. Obviously, starting a brand new professional sports franchise is a very intensive endeavor. Obviously, at this point in time, and traditionally through its history, Major League Soccer clubs have not been money-making operations. In a lot of cases, most teams lose money. And Inter-Miami turning profitable this year, for example, was the first time in their brief history. So he meets with Beckham, and immediately, they hit it off. They have this shared vision. They get on the same page, and Mas calls back. Garber says, I'm all in. I saw it as a great opportunity, a great opportunity to bring the fifth professional sports team to the city that saw me at my birth, a city that I love, and more importantly, to leave a mark and a legacy, you know, doing something special and doing something different. The first time I met Jorge Mas, he had a grand vision, not just for the team and the stadium project, but he wanted to, and pitched to us, that he wanted to be the best team in Major League Soccer, wanted to have one of the best soccer teams in the world, and wanted to help drive Major League Soccer to be one of the top leagues in the world. And we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that he had David Beckham as a partner. And David has, you know, such a great history with the sport and has such a deep connection with the greatest players who've ever played the game. And I believe David was one of the great players in the history of the game. When you put the two of them together, it was a superpower. This was a complicated project. Miami is a very well-developed city. Real estate is complicated to wire together. Getting public funding for a stadium was, and the approvals was complicated. So we knew coming into this, there were just real headwinds. I think for anybody who knows Jorge Mas or has an opportunity to spend any time with him, this is one of the most optimistic people I've ever been around in my career. No never means no, it means how can we get it done? No challenge is too big. No vision is unreachable. Well, Inter-Miami, when we launched, couldn't have launched under more difficult circumstances, which was COVID. You know, there was a point a few weeks after we canceled our first game in the beginning of COVID where we didn't know what the future held. We'd invested hundreds of millions of dollars. We'd had all that momentum and, you know, but listen, we just, you know, pulled up our bootstraps, adjusted, adapted, and just, again, just continued, you know, working hard and making sure that when people think of soccer and football in the United States, I always wanted to think of Inter-Miami. Landing Lionel Messi is just kind of a Herculean accomplishment for this league. I mean, obviously it's been very much compared to when they brought David Beckham over. At the time, Messi's with Barcelona. You know, he's in the height of his career. There's to a degree, you have to accept the fact that Messi wasn't going to come over here at 30 years old. You know, that's not to say young players don't come over here, but Messi was in a good situation. So then he moves to PSG in 2021, and towards the end of his PSG career, rumors are swirling about what he's going to do next. Starting in 2019 and throughout this entire period, Jorge Mas is connecting with the family. He's communicating with them, being a friend, building a relationship, showing who he is as a person, and talking about what he wants to do with Miami. He had a vision for this club, and, you know, by many accounts, it was far-fetched, and he achieved that vision. He made a compelling offer, he built a relationship, and there were doubters along the way. There were people saying it couldn't be done, forget about it, and, you know, Jorge Mas shut out the noise. Goes back to our roots and how we've built everything in our family, you know, grinding hard work, never saying never, and having faith, and having faith that the dream and vision of bringing the world's greatest player to enter Miami and to Major League Soccer was going to happen. Was not might happen, maybe, but was going to happen. I was driven by the belief that we had all of the elements, that it was in the best interest of all parties. There was a lot of, you know, people who doubted, you know, oh my God, Jorge Mas is pursuing Leonel Messi, poor guy, he'll never get him, he's got no chance. You know, and again, like sort of like a chip on our shoulder, you know, we're gonna get this done. And so the fact that I was able to build a privileged relationship with Leonel and his family, and specifically with his father, Jorge, over the course of years, I think, you know, brought about the possibility and the probability that, you know, we would sign him in the summer of 2023. So, you know, when I knew that he was gonna come to the team at some point in late May, a few weeks before he announced his decision from Paris, you know, it was a culmination of a lot of hard work. And I knew it would have a positive impact, but to see the impact that he had on the pitch, on the field, the impact he had with fans when we traveled, thousands of people outside our hotel, you know, people on the route of our team bus going to stadiums, lining them up, games are sold out. The attention around Leonel and what he's been able to do, especially on the heels of he having won the World Cup in Argentina, has been frankly amazing. And commercially, the amount of partners and partnerships that we've been able to establish and sponsors who've come in, you know, wanting to be in a relationship with Inter Miami and Leonel Messi has been frankly, I think beyond because what we've tapped is global in nature. I think for me, the most important part of having Leo here is he decided that this was his club and league of choice. It is strategically way more important than the financial benefit of that. It's telling the world MLS is worthy of the best player in the game to be able to, you know, play and be the guy that he wants to be, just wants to go out and win games. Then you add to that the commercial value of that with ticket sales and merchandise sales, both locally in Miami and across the league. And it's dramatic, it's no different than what he's playing in League One in France or playing with PSG or playing in La Liga and playing with FC Barcelona. There are enormous commercial values of having a player like Messi. MASTEC is a publicly traded infrastructure engineering and construction firm. They've diversified what they do a little bit more recently. They've gotten into renewable energy. Basically about 50 or so years ago, Jorge Mas's father, Jorge Mas Canosa, who was another very accomplished businessman and a legendary Cuban exile advocate as well. He bought into this company that was later renamed Church and Tower and they dealt in telecom and different types of construction. And he revitalized this business, which was failing at the time, and grew it into basically a pretty substantial company. Initially, for a long time, I wanted to be a baseball player. For many times, that was the first sport that I loved. Secondly, I wanted, you know, as I evolved, as I became a teenager, so on, I wanted, you know, I wanted to run the family business. You know, we're in the infrastructure and construction business. And, you know, that was my dream. And, you know, dreams do come true. When Jorge Mas, the younger one, went there and worked there full-time, he kind of brought in this era of change with the business. They automated their billing systems, brought computers into the office. But what really kind of set things on the path that led to today is Hurricane Andrew hits Florida in 1992. And Mas makes this aggressive play to basically rebuild the state's infrastructure. And it wasn't an easy task, but they were successful. It grew the company's revenues tremendously, and it led to this reverse merger with one of their competitors that laid the groundwork for Mas Tech to emerge. And since then, Mas Tech has grown substantially. Last year, actually, they reported $12 billion in annual revenue. We're in a trailer in a dirt yard in South Dade County, hustling, you know, just trying to make enough money to make payroll and to be able to feed the family. You know, and today we're a Fortune 400 company. Again, dreaming anything is possible, but the early days, and I remember them vividly because those were our roots. You know, it was just hard work, persevere, grind. You know, just grind. Days were 16 to 18 hours, not eight. My father was very special. He was my best friend, a mentor. My greatest memories with my father and my brothers were always Dolphin Games on Sundays. We're rabid, passionate fans, and just great. And, you know, watching the Dolphins win the NFC Championship game to go 84, I believe, to the Super Bowl with Dan Marino in his rookie year was a highlight in our sports family lore. Frankly, sort of like, you know, the Holy Grail would have been being the owner of the Dolphins, you know, at the time as a young South Florida kid, rabid, you know, Dolphins fans, but life has taken me to where it should. To be able to share this journey, you know, with my brother and with my family has been truly a blessing. It's just another beginning, another chapter. Done, and now we move on. I've learned in our corporate life a lot of lessons. You're never measured, you know, we're a publicly traded company. You're never measured either by your stock price and the team. You're never measured only by wins and losses. You're measured by building a culture of success, building one that can go through the ups and downs. There's always gonna be downs. There's always gonna be, you know, certain failures and obstacles, but it's how you face them. It's how you persevere. We'll have Leonel Messi here for two, three, four years, however long Leonel wants to play, and that's amazing in itself. But we also look forward, you know, to what does a post-Messi era bring? And, you know, I can anticipate that Inter-Miami will always have one of the top players in the world on our roster, hopefully, you know, with, together with my fellow owners in Major League Soccer. And then four or five years from now, we can have 15, 20 of the top 80 to 100 players in the world here. But I am extremely optimistic about the future of our league, about the future of the sport in our country. We wanna be one of the top leagues in the world. We want people to think about us like they think about the Premier League. And I believe that we are already part of that group of top leagues in the world, but we want to be the league where somebody's making a decision to go to Man City, or they're gonna go to New York City, or they're gonna go to Chicago, they're gonna go to LA, or they're gonna go to Madrid. And we've got work to do to continue to become part of the global conversation and be a league of choice for all the top players in the world, and be a league of choice for the young players who are coming up through our academies, but I believe we'll achieve that. Miami's an amazing city, very glamorous, global, but it's not that. This is a city built on dreams, the dreams of so many families who come to this country looking for nothing more than freedom and an opportunity to, you know, create a better life for their family, and I'm hopeful that Inter-Miami's a reflection of our community and that team, so that's been our dream and aspiration.