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.
According to Franco Panizo, a veteran soccer reporter whose work has appeared here at Awful Announcing and who we covered last month when Inter Miami declined to credential him for Nu Stadium’s opening match for the first time in six seasons, noted afterward 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.
When reporter Andrey Anez 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. Panizo was there Saturday night, but getting a credential to cover Inter Miami hasn’t always been guaranteed for him. Earlier this season, Inter Miami declined to credential Panizo for Nu Stadium’s opening match, ending a streak of six seasons of perfect attendance that had even earned him a plaque from the club itself. While no explanation was given, his credentials were eventually restored, which is how he was there to watch the stars disappear postgame while their younger teammates answered questions about a historic collapse.
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 things go wrong.
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