Lionel Messi just beat Michael Jordan in a poll. Not on a basketball court — on a list of the greatest icons in American sport, as voted by 1,000 UK-based fans of US sports. The man has been at Inter Miami for less than two years and he's already outranking the most recognisable athlete the United States has ever produced.
Jordan came second. Tom Brady third. David Beckham — another import, notably — also featured, alongside Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Shaquille O'Neal. The top 30 is a decent mix of eras and codes, but the number one spot going to an Argentine playing MLS football says something real about how global star power reshapes a league's visibility overnight.
Why Messi's MLS effect is bigger than the scoreline
85% of British fans said individual players were what first drew them to US sport. That's the key number here. Not the leagues, not the franchises — the people. And 43% said they would change the team they support if their favourite player left, a figure that jumps to 77% among 18 to 24-year-olds. Messi didn't just sign for Inter Miami. He handed the club a fanbase that didn't exist before July 2023.
MLS finished second in UK league popularity at 18%, just behind the NFL at 19% and ahead of the NBA at 17%. A year ago that ordering would have looked very different. The NFL has decades of carefully cultivated UK presence — London games, broadcast deals, merchandise everywhere. MLS sitting that close is not a coincidence.
How British fans actually watch
The barriers are familiar: 50% cite time zones as the main obstacle, 32% point to subscription costs. Neither is going away. But engagement is clearly finding other routes — 61% watch full live matches, 51% follow highlights, and social media does a lot of the heavy lifting.
- YouTube: 60% of fans use it to follow US sport
- Instagram: 39%
- X (formerly Twitter): 38%
- Facebook: 37%
More than two thirds of UK fans have already travelled to the US to attend an NFL or NBA game, with another 23% planning to. That's not passive fandom. That's a market spending real money.
The research was commissioned by Chiliz, a digital fan engagement company, and the framing is inevitably about how platforms can monetise all this attention. But strip that away and the underlying data is striking. Messi, at 37, playing in a league many European fans still don't take entirely seriously, is the face of American sport to British audiences. That's quite a statement about what one signing can do to a league's international footprint — and Inter Miami's odds of remaining relevant well beyond his playing days just got a lot more interesting.
