Suarez will not be the only one, another ex-Liverpool joins Inter Miami

We’re now less than a month away from the start of the new MLS season. Lionel Messi arrived too late to make a telling impact on the league table in 2023, but David Beckham is fast turning Inter Miami into a team of all-stars, and expectations for 2024 will be high. They were sent higher still by the arrival of former Liverpool and Barcelona striker Luis Suárez. Despite turning 37 this week, there’s still excitement about what he will bring to MLS alongside Messi.

Pre-season is underway already, and the Messi and Suárez reunion went somewhat predictably, a drab goalless draw, as a team now full of veterans began the process of getting back up to speed. As well as Messi and Suárez, fellow Barcelona alumni Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets were on the field, showing the transfer pull MLS, and especially Inter Miami, now holds. There are parallels to the exodus to Saudi Arabia after Cristiano Ronaldo blazed the trail, except US soccer is managing to attract these big names without such exorbitant salary packages.

That’s indicative of a league on the rise, with Beckham hoping the acquisition of Messi can bring the interest and the level of MLS up to a new level again, much like his own arrival did a little over 15 years ago. And the next person to be attracted by Messi’s pulling power could be another former Liverpool star. According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, Inter Miami ‘dreams’ of adding Philippe Coutinho to the ranks, after his loan from Aston Villa to Al-Duhail in Qatar was cut short. His parent club has long since ‘dumped’ him, and Messi could ‘bring’ his old Barcelona colleague to join the party.

Messi has reportedly already put in a phone call, and Coutinho is ‘thinking about it’. But he’s got some nerve to be doing that: if Inter Miami is genuinely interested, he should be jumping at the opportunity. Perhaps his experience in forcing through a transfer from Liverpool to Barcelona has made him more cautious about the moves he makes. That would certainly be understandable. But the simple reality is that Coutinho has done very little to warrant a move to MLS.

Coutinho close to arriving in the MLS

None of this is to say that Liverpool holds Coutinho any ill will, at least not anymore. If Inter Miami is prepared to give him an opportunity in MLS, let’s hope he seizes it with both hands and can enjoy some respite from a succession of setbacks. But relying on favors from Messi is not where Coutinho could possibly have imagined he would be at the age of just 31. The fact that Inter Miami would be taking a gamble by bringing him to MLS just about says it all about a player who should simply never have left Liverpool.