On Saturday night, Orlando City became just the third team in MLS history to overcome a three-goal deficit and win, storming back from 3-0 down to beat Inter Miami 4-3 at Nu Stadium. It was, as MLS itself put it on its own website, the greatest comeback in league history.
What followed postgame said just as much about this club as the result itself.
Franco Panizo, a veteran soccer reporter whose work has appeared here at Awful Announcing, noted that the club sent its younger players out to face the media while Lionel Messi, Rodrigo De Paul, and Luis Suarez were nowhere to be found. Panizo has not been credentialed by Inter Miami since the club declined to issue him one for Nu Stadium’s opening match earlier this season, ending six straight seasons of perfect attendance, so he was there Saturday night as a fan, relaying the postgame scene through the reporting of credentialed colleagues Andrea Yanez and Jose Armando.
When Yanez asked Noah Allen, one of the younger players put up to face reporters, whether it’s tough to be one of the faces after rough results regularly, Allen’s answer was honest.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not going to lie, yeah.”
Inter Miami entered the match unbeaten in 11 straight games, and had been so dominant in the first half that Messi — in his 100th appearance for the club across all competitions — scored a stunning strike to make it 3-0 before halftime.
Orlando, a team near the bottom of the Eastern Conference that hadn’t won away from home all season, proceeded to score four unanswered goals. The loss also extended Inter Miami’s winless run at Nu Stadium to four matches, a remarkable and embarrassing fact for a club that generated enormous fanfare around the stadium’s opening last month.
None of the postgame accountability issues are particularly new for this organization. Inter Miami has always operated as if the normal rules don’t apply to it, whether that’s how it builds its roster, how it handles credentials, or how it handles accountability after bad results. Saturday night was another reminder of the gap between the global brand Inter Miami wants to project and the way it actually conducts itself when the moment demands something more.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.