Inter Miami coach Tata Martino resigns after MLS Cup flop
Inter Miami coach Tata Martino has resigned after his team’s early MLS Cup exit. According to multiple
sources, the Argentinian manager left the club for personal reasons.
BREAKING: Tata Martino is OUT as Inter Miami manager, per sources.
Martino decided to leave for personal reasons, sources add.
Martino led Miami to league-record 74 point regular season then lost in round one to Atlanta United. www.givemesport.com/tata-martino…
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— Tom Bogert (@tombogert.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 11:10 AM
Martino joined Inter Miami in the summer of 2023. He arrived with a strong MLS pedigree, having won the MLS Cup with Atlanta United five years earlier in 2018, but he also had a deep connection to Lionel Messi. The two hail from the same region of Argentina and worked together at Barcelona (2013-14) and the Argentinian national team (2014-16).
When Martino accepted the Inter Miami job, he did so with a firm understanding of the task. The club had recently signed Lionel Messi and was a few weeks away from adding Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba and Luis Suarez to its roster. The expectations were clear: take Miami to the pinnacle of American soccer and do it with style.
Things started well for Martino. Shortly after his appointment, he and his team lifted the 2023 League Cup, a small mid-season trophy; as they built for the 2024 season, they set their sights on a domestic double. Only eight teams have won MLS’s two prestigious trophies — the Supporters’ Shield, honoring the best team in the regular season, and the MLS Cup, honoring the playoff winner — in the same season. Martino and Miami aimed to be the ninth.
After a solid start to the season and a blistering run of form through the summer, Inter Miami delivered on the first half of its goal. The club won the 2024 Supporters’ Shield and did so in record-breaking fashion: its 74-point haul was the largest regular-season points total in the league’s history.
Martino and Miami naturally entered the MLS Cup Playoffs as the top seed and the clear favorite for the title. But Atlanta United — the wild-card entry that ended the regular season with 34 fewer points than Miami — proved to be a thorn in Miami’s side.
The three-game series between the two started positively for Miami, with Alba sealing an emphatic 2-1 win in Game 1, but soon fell apart as Atlanta’s confidence grew. Atlanta reversed the scoreline in Game 2, winning 2-1 thanks to a last-minute Xande Silva goal, and rode its momentum to a stunning 3-2 victory in Game 3. The result knocked Miami out of the MLS Cup in the first round.
“If you think about the expectations we had for the playoffs, we evidently fell too short,” Martino said after his team’s elimination. “In the final stretch of the year we’d gotten used to achieving our objectives, and we weren’t able to achieve the most important one.”
That’s where Martino leaves this Inter Miami side: on one hand, it set the all-time MLS points record and took home the Supporters’ Shield, but on the other, it delivered the league’s greatest choke in the first round of the playoffs.
Several options have been floated as potential replacements for Martino. Xavi, the Spanish coach who played with Messi, Busquets, Alba and Suarez in Barcelona, is available and might be tempted; Javier Mascherano, the former Argentinian midfielder who played with Messi on the national team, could be interested.
Inter Miami’s MLS season is over; it will return to action in February 2025. Messi is under contract for another season with the club.
