How Lionel Messi changed everything about soccer in America

When acclaimed soccer writer Paul Tenorio followed Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami team to Dallas for one of the superstar’s first road games in America in 2023, the scene outside the team’s Renaissance Plano hotel was strangely calm.A few fans lingered behind barriers.

Nothing unusual.Nothing chaotic.

Not yet.Then word spread: Messi was inside.Within hours, the hotel became a frenzy.Crowds swarmed the lobby, packed the entrances and jammed every floor.

As Tenorio rode the elevator to his room, it stopped on each and every floor, fans piling in each time — smashing every button in sight in the hope that, when the doors slid open, Lionel Messi would be standing there waiting for them.That, says Tenorio in “The Messi Effect: How the Global Legend Changed the Future of American Soccer” (St.Martin’s Press), is the Messi effect: part athlete, part rock star, part religious experience.

“By most any measure, Messi in Major League Soccer (MLS) has been an overwhelming success,” he writes.Born in June 1987, Lionel Messi grew up in Rosario, Argentina, a small kid with a massive talent — and a serious growth hormone deficiency that threatened his future in soccer. At 13, his family made a life-changing move to Spain after FC Barcelona agreed to cover his medical treatment and development.From those humble, uncertain beginnings, Messi rose to global superstardom, winning everything in the game and cementing a legacy that many consider the greatest in the history of the sport.After 18 years at Barcelona, Messi joined Paris Saint-Germain in France but left within two years to join Inter Miami, one of the newest franchises in MLS and partly-owned by Brit superstar David Beckham.For a league desperate for a boost, both in terms of quality and publicity, Messi was the dream recruit.“He is so enormously popular globally and I also think he is the greatest of all time, right?” Tenorio tells The Post.

“And Americans want to be close to athletes like that....