Jorge Mas thumps his hand down on the desk in his corner office in Coral Gables, Florida.
“If you will it, it will happen,” he says.
Thump.
“Will it.”
Thump.
“Will it.”
Mas is talking about his family’s story. About how Church & Tower, a company his father built that started as “a couple guys in the back of a pick up truck digging ditches for a phone company,” grew into MasTec, a Fortune 400 company that did $9.8 billion in revenue in 2022.
“I am a dreamer,” Mas says. “There’s always going to be obstacles, people pulling at you, pulling you down … but you will it. It may not be a straight path, but you will it.”
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It’s this ethos that helped MasTec navigate through the telecom crash in 2000, Mas says, and that led him to buy into Inter Miami when David Beckham needed someone who could get a stadium deal over the line. It is also that exact willingness to push boundaries and push relentlessly forward that makes him somewhat of a polarizing figure in MLS ownership circles, winning over some with his ambition and alienating others for the rules violations for which Miami was hit with sanctions two years ago.
Mas (left) with Messi, his brother Jose and David Beckham at the unveiling (Photo: CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
Mas’s legacy in the league changed forever on June 7, however. He is now and forever the man who brought Lionel Messi to MLS.
On a Monday afternoon in mid-June, two weeks after Messi shocked the world with the announcement that he would continue his career in MLS, Mas agreed to sit down and discuss his journey to this point — how he thinks about leadership, his father’s impact on him and how he hopes to push the league forward.
From behind his desk, Mas looks directly at the downtown skyline of Miami. It’s a city the family company helped to rebuild after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992, taking on contracts to reconstruct the damaged telecom infrastructure. The windows to his left overlook Miami International Airport, and the site where Miami Freedom Park, Inter Miami’s $1 billion stadium, is planned to open in 2025.
Every day when Mas shows up to work and sits down, he looks out on decades of his and his family’s legacy.
“I’m driven by something,” Mas says. “I’m driven about making a change, leaving fingerprints.”
His voice trails off a bit. He knows bringing Messi to Miami can be one of his more significant contributions to the landscape of the city he loves.
“Transformational,” he says.
Mas’s ideas about legacy stem from his father, Jorge Mas Canosa, the hugely influential Cuban exile leader who rose to prominence in both business and political circles. Mas Canosa, who arrived in the U.S. as a penniless refugee, first worked as a milkman and shoe salesman in Little Havana, the neighborhood in Miami sandwiched between the airport and downtown where many Cuban exiles lived. He not only built a successful company, but eventually amassed significant power and influence in U.S.-Cuban politics as a fierce advocate against Fidel Castro. His ability to garner audience and influence with presidents and politicians made a lasting impression on his son.
“I saw my father reach an apex politically for a Cuban exile,” Mas said. “The way my father thought, my father never allowed there to be a ceiling.”
Mas, meanwhile, worked summers as a teenager on a restoration crew for his father’s company, filling ditches with sod or temporary paving. Mas said he learned to drive a bobcat simply so he could have some shade during those summer days. At one point as he speaks about those summers, he holds his hands up to show the callouses from where his hands would bleed doing the work.
“My mom would be like, ‘Oh my God,’” he says, smiling.
Mas spent his college years at the University of Miami, where he got a degree in business administration and, later, his MBA. His father brought him into the company to work and learn under him. The business grew after Hurricane Andrew, and eventually executed a reverse merger with its biggest competitor, renaming itself as MasTec in 1994. Mas said he used to tell his father that one day they would ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. He quickly rattles off the date when that dream came true: February 14, 1997.
“Think about that,” Mas said. “I’m a Cuban-American kid from Miami and I’m ringing the opening bell at the most important exchange in the world.”
Mas wants MLS owners to take advantage of this moment (Photo: Eric Espada/Getty Images)
Mas’s father died from lung cancer in 1997 at the age of 58. Mas said he spent 16 hours a day with him through the final six months of his life. For Mas, watching his father say his goodbyes was transformative. Those final days and hours can provide a peek into the things to value most in the time you have.
“It was the best learning experience of my life, period,” Mas said. “I learned more in those last moments than I did spending years with him, up, down and sideways, and my college degrees and my education. Those moments. Those moments for me were, like, blow-away.”
The days after his father’s passing were impactful, too. Thousands of people came out for Mas Canosa’s funeral. Mourners waited hours for visitation. Mas delivered the eulogy, but as he looked around at the sheer number of people who came out to honor and remember his father, it reinforced how he thought about the impact a person can make on a community.
“My brothers and I have always looked at life, of how important the legacy you leave is how you touch people,” Mas said.
That extends to MasTec’s 30,000-plus employees, he said, and the networks that spread from them. It also influences how he thinks about owning Inter Miami, which he sees as an extension of the community.
“I looked at bringing a team here, as how do we leave something important, as a steward of a team,” Mas said. “Because we’re stewards, that’s what we are, right? Hopefully, this team is here in perpetuity, if our family is always involved, great, but we’re stewards. And we looked at everything as, ‘How can we leave a legacy here?’”
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When you read the profiles and obituaries about Mas Canosa, a picture is painted of a savvy businessman and politician, but also a man who wasn’t afraid of rankling or challenging anyone whom he perceived to stand in the way of his goals and hopes for Cuba. The Miami Herald described Mas Canosa as “a controversial figure,” and said he “moved with the trappings of a head of state, relying on bodyguards, an armored car and a private jet.” He was both “respected in some quarters” and “feared in others,” they wrote, and was able to win allies with “a mixture of charm and persistence.”
There are very clear aspects of his father in Mas. He is driven towards his goals, sometimes with tunnel vision and at times leaving some damage in the wake. People who work with him also talk about an almost unyielding optimism that he will achieve what he wants. He tends to figure out problems as they come, and doesn’t let a potential future problem stop a deal today. The charm and persistence are there, too.
Mas acknowledged that some of his tendencies push boundaries. It’s why his brother, MasTec CEO Jose Mas, is such an important counterbalance to some of those attributes. Mas says one of the best parts of owning Inter Miami is that he’s doing it alongside Jose.
“My brother grounds me,” Jorge Mas says. “Sometimes I …”
Mas holds his hand up like an airplane wavering as it climbs and makes a whooshing sound.
“He’s more grounded,” Mas continues. “He’s very analytical in his thinking. … I’m a flier and he grounds me. And I think we make an amazing team because of that.”
That persistence and tendency to be a flier can also bring massive rewards. They were critical factors in landing Messi, even as many believed MLS could never compete with Barcelona, PSG and Saudi Arabia.
“That’s what I try to teach my children is listen, believe and dream, believe and dream and work — and stay,” Mas says. “There’s so many things that deviate, and you can throw in the towel. There were so many times during this last year and a half or two years with the Messi thing that, ‘Ah, throw in the towel. It’s not going to happen.’ Etcetera, etcetera. Stay the course, stay the course, stay the course, stay the course.”
The cemetery where his father is buried is visible from Mas’s office, too. It informs how he thinks about legacy as much as the skyline or the stadium site.
Messi speaks to his new fans (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“Inevitably my father has had a huge impact on me and my persona and my approach, my philosophy of life,” Mas said. “He was my teacher. I was blessed enough to spend a significant amount of time with him from a young age. There’s no doubt that my approach, my thoughts were all obviously shaped by seeing my father. But what always echoes with me is something my father always told me: ‘Never walk in my shadow.’ And I’ve never done that and what I’ve always thought is I will extend his footsteps.”
Mas said he thinks of his father every day, and he pauses and chokes up when asked what his father would think about him bringing Messi here. He gives a thumbs up and nods, his eyes filling with tears.
“Thumbs up,” he finally says, his words barely able to register above a whisper.
As the rain fell on DRV PNK Stadium last Sunday, fans cheered for the celebrities they came to see in person, David Beckham and Messi. Mas was an unknown figure to some before, especially in the global football landscape. This was his unveiling as much as the Argentine legend’s.
Beckham spoke to the fans to start off the night, but it was Mas on the microphone announcing Messi. It was a moment in the spotlight for an owner who, MLS commissioner Don Garber said Sunday, had delivered on exactly what he told the league he would do: get a stadium deal against “insurmountable odds,” and bring Messi to MLS.
“Jorge Mas could be the most optimistic, ambitious owner that I’ve ever been around,” Garber told The Athletic ahead of Messi’s unveil event. “He’s tireless, he certainly never takes no for an answer. I think it speaks to his family history. You grow up that way, and you have come through the adversity that his family went through, and then you’ve achieved great success, nothing is impossible. … When you’re (building a team) from scratch it requires tremendous vision, and I love spending time with Jorge. I really enjoy getting on the phone with him and he provides me with this sense of hope, almost on every issue. And that’s a rare quality and it’s a good quality in our league, which still, as you know, has its best days still ahead.”
Mas is who he is, and you get the good and bad with it. His time in MLS has been a demonstration of that. Behind the scenes with owners on the league’s board of governors, Mas has been a voice for change in how MLS operates — he believes rule changes could accelerate MLS’s growth. He was also fined $250,000 by the league in 2021 for his role in a cheating scandal in which Inter Miami paid players off the books to get around MLS rules, most notably French World Cup winner Blaise Matuidi.
Now, of course, his place in the league’s power dynamics has changed dramatically. Mas delivered a potentially transformational moment for MLS, one that has reshaped the league’s commercial landscape. Each league owner will benefit from Mas’s significant investment. Mas has said the total package of compensation is around $50 to $60 million per year, including the equity stake. A source with knowledge of the deal who was granted anonymity to preserve his business relationship told The Athletic that Messi’s salary is “in the twenties,” with multiple bonuses that can impact the number any given season.
“Jorge is a big thinker, but he has also rubbed plenty of people the wrong way,” one upper-level executive at an MLS club, who requested anonymity to protect his business relationships, told The Athletic in June. “I think (the way the entire deal went down) could’ve cost him if this hadn’t worked out. But now he’s responsible for the biggest signing in the history of MLS. What can anybody tell him?”
Mas is well aware of the opportunity Messi presents — to the league, to his team and to the power dynamics on the board of governors. And he seems ready to leverage the Messi signing to push MLS to make changes he thinks are critical to the league’s growth.
“The amount of interest in-bound commercially and sporting-side is far beyond what I think any of us could have imagined,” Mas says. “So I can see a scenario where Leo Messi is probably the greatest ambassador in this league’s history because I think you’re going to have an unprecedented influx of demand of players wanting to come play here in Major League Soccer, for Miami and for other teams.”
The question, Mas says, is what to do with that interest. In his mind, there is only one right answer: the league has to do whatever it can to take full advantage of this moment in time.
As he told reporters after Wednesday’s MLS board of governors meeting: “Evolution is inevitable and change is likely. We all want this to be an elite league, we all want it to grow.”
Much like the creation of the designated player rule helped to alter the league, Mas believes the league needs to rethink how it restricts owners from spending money. He emphasized that he believes in a salary cap — “There has to be financial discipline there, there are certain elements that are extremely important as a league,” he said — but also that owners should have more freedom to spend more across the roster.
Mas divides opinion in MLS (Photo: Marcos Cebrian/Europa Press via Getty Images)
It creates a scenario where someone once punished for breaking the roster rules is now the main protagonist for bringing about change that some fans and team executives have hoped might come.
“How do we position our league, on the sporting and commercial side, to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity,” Mas said in June. “I think over the course of the next six to nine months, to a year, I think that whatever we need to do to be able to adapt to a new reality, we’re going to do. Because we’re gonna seize the moment. Because all of the owners, we’re all smart, they’re all super smart, they’re all good, they’re all ambitious. We have a tremendous group of owners in the league, so I think we are going to seize the moment.”
It is the next goal on which Mas seems to have set his sights, even if a difficult path lies ahead with the complicated politics of a board of 30 owners with differing opinions on the right way forward.
“I think the moment is now,” Mas said. “I think the league can go to a hyper growth mode. And I think it will.”
Sometimes you just have to will it.
