FORT LAUDERDALE — Lionel Messi scored his 930th career goal and 20th MLS goal of the 2026 season, but Inter Miami drew 2–2 with San Diego FC at Chase Stadium on September 20.
Anders Dreyer scored twice for San Diego, including an 82nd-minute equalizer that spoiled new Inter Miami coach Kily González’s winning debut. Luis Suárez had put Miami ahead in the 74th minute after Messi’s spectacular free kick gave the hosts an early lead.
The result extended Inter Miami’s winless MLS run to four matches. Dreyer’s late finish, set up by Jeppe Tverskov, erased Miami’s advantage and ensured San Diego left Fort Lauderdale with a point.
The final score was 2-2. Inter Miami has not won a league game since August 29.
Dreyer had opened the match in the 12th minute on a move that began in San Diego’s half. Tverskov’s throughball split Miami’s backline from roughly the halfway line and found Dreyer charging in. He did not rush. He waited for St. Clair to commit and then dinked the ball over him — the kind of finish that suggests composure rather than improvisation. That it came from the visitor, against a team with Messi and Suárez in the starting eleven, was not the evening Chase Stadium had anticipated.
Messi produced the response that this crowd always waits for. His free kick in the 24th minute should, technically, have been a cross. He struck it from beyond the right corner of the penalty area toward goal. It missed everyone in the middle, continued toward the far left post, and went in off the inside. Whether goalkeeper CJ Dos Santos was unsighted or simply beaten by the angle is a matter for analysis; what is beyond debate is that the strike was Messi’s 20th MLS goal of the 2026 season, his 101st in all competitions for Inter Miami, and the 930th of a career that no longer needs superlatives to make its scale plain. According to Yahoo Sports, the goal also made him the second player in MLS history to score 20 or more goals in three consecutive seasons, joining LAFC’s Denis Bouanga.
Miami held that 1-1 for half an hour after the interval without finding a second. Then Rodrigo De Paul’s pass split San Diego’s defensive shape at the 74th minute and Suárez received it at a tight angle. He lifted the ball over Dos Santos into the far corner — a finish that only the specific geometry of a long career at elite level makes look routine. At 2-1, with sixteen minutes to play, Chase Stadium began to believe the contest was settled.
González had replaced predecessor Lionel Scaloni — who departed the club in late August following a disagreement with management over recruitment — and Sunday was his first league game in charge. Before kickoff, he told reporters that he felt “a lot of anxiety, a lot of joy at the same time and a lot of uncertainty about how I was going to feel.” What followed was a performance containing the early signals of a team mid-transition: Miami scored twice and conceded twice in a match they led three separate times — after Messi’s 24th-minute equalizer, after Suárez’s 74th-minute finish, and again when Dreyer struck eight minutes from the end.
In other Sunday sports action, the Premier League saw Manchester City edge Sunderland 5-3 despite a Brian Brobbey hat-trick for the visitors — a result that left City three points clear at the top through five games. Separately, Dak Prescott broke Tony Romo’s franchise touchdown record in Dallas’s 37-20 NFL win over Washington.
For San Diego, the draw ended a three-match losing streak and confirmed what their most productive combination has suggested through the season: Dreyer and Tverskov, given space behind a high defensive line, are one of the more dangerous pairings in the Western Conference. Dreyer’s two goals brought his MLS season total to eleven. According to Fox Sports, San Diego’s unbeaten away record in September is the product of exactly this kind of late-game composure from their forward line.
Messi leads the MLS Golden Boot standings with 20 goals and 13 assists — 33 goal contributions — and the league’s scoring record looks likely to be his before the regular season ends. But the arithmetic was cold comfort on Sunday. A team that concedes 82nd-minute equalizers at home is not yet solving the right problems, and the question González cannot yet answer is whether the transition he inherited can be accelerated before the playoff picture narrows in October.
September ends with four draws and a number — 930 — that means rather less to Inter Miami’s supporters than the three points they still need.
