Inter Miami turned to Guillermo Hoyos on Tuesday, naming the club’s director of player development to take over the first team indefinitely after Javier Mascherano left following 67 matches in charge. Mascherano departs with one MLS Cup title on his record, but the change lands in mid-April, only one week after the club opened its new stadium.
Hoyos is not a stranger to the biggest name in the room. He coached Lionel Messi at Barcelona when Messi was 17, and Messi later called him his “footballing father.”
The move hands Inter Miami another reset after a start that has been uneven by its own standards. The club opened the regular season with three wins, three draws and one loss, then fell out of the Concacaf Champions Cup in the round of 16. That came after last December’s MLS Cup title, a run that had seemed to point toward stability rather than another shakeup.
Instead, the front office has kept changing shape along with the sideline. Diego Alonso, Phil Neville, Tata Martino and Mascherano have all come and gone as head coaches. Chris Henderson was pushed out before the 2025 season after Raúl Sanllehí arrived as president of football operations, and Sanllehí was later removed from all sporting decisions and replaced by Hoyos.
The roster has been just as restless. Inter Miami spent a reported $15 million on Germán Berterame, but he has scored only once since arriving from CF Monterrey. Dayne St. Clair joined in the winter from Minnesota United, and Micael was brought in to help steady the back line. The club also signed Lionel Messi in the summer of 2023, a move that transformed its profile and its expectations.
But Miami’s volatility is not limited to coaching changes and marquee names. Its 2020 signing of Blaise Matuidi led to an MLS investigation, and the league found the club culpable of violating roster rules, then fined it and cut its allocation money for the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Tuesday’s move fits that pattern: another attempt to correct course without waiting for the season to settle.
What happens next is whether Hoyos can turn a club that keeps rebooting itself into one that holds together long enough to finish a season on its own terms.
