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The MLS regular season doesn’t begin play until March 6, but preseason preparations have begun around the league. Scavenging the social media accounts of all 20 clubs, we’ve compiled the best photos and videos from the 2016 preseason for your viewing pleasure. Smiling faces, southern sunshine and a tangible excitment surrounding the growth of MLS make the 21st season of the league the most anticipated to date.  

The Best Photos and Videos from the 2016 MLS Preseason:

Andrea Pirlo doing what only Andrea Pirlo can:

Javier Hernandez has been linked with Liverpool lately, and it isn't exactly hard to see why. Chicharito has been in magnificent form this season, scoring 21 goals in 24 games in all competitions for Bayer Leverkusen. A player of his skill set could be exactly what Jurgen Klopp needs. The German's team has played some good football at times, but a lack of clinical finishing (and some suspect defending) has seen them fail to make any headway in the Premier League table.

Lionel Messi is unique among athletes in that there are lots of people who think it's totally worth getting arrested just to be a little nearer to him. American sports don't see near the amount of fans running on to fields that soccer does, especially in regards to Messi. One young fan appeared to have made the most of his pitch-invaderdom following Barcelona's game against Malaga, hugging Messi and ending up with a game-worn Messi jersey.

And then the security guards decided to keep the Messi jersey for themselves.

There are many Lionel Messi fans out there. Millions, certainly. Billions, possibly. A little harder to find are LIONEL MESSI FANS, who only pop up once in a blue moon. Via the Internet, we encountered one such gentleman today.

This LIONEL MESSI FAN had the good fortune to receive an opportunity to acquire the best soccer player in the world's autograph. So what did he have Messi sign? His back, right next to his gigantic Messi tattoo, featuring two of Messi's trophies: the 2012 Copa del Rey trophy and the 2015 Copa del Rey trophy.

Messi cannot break the laws of physics. As much as some of his fans love to say that he does, and as magical as his talent may seem, it is physically impossible for him to break the laws of physics. It is impossible for all of us, independent of some sort of incredible technology, to break the laws of physics. With a ball at his feet, Messi must obey the same laws as everyone else in the world. He just happens to be the best in the world at pushing those laws to their very limits. He can put the ball wherever he wants, curve it however he wants, but how does he do it?

Remember the adorable little boy who made a Messi jersey out of a plastic bag and then went viral on the internet? If reports from various media organizations, most notably Sky News, are to be believed, his identity has been discovered at record speed even for the web.

A Kurdish television station is claiming to have found the boy, identified by them as a boy named Hamid, who lives in Dohuk, Kurdistan, in Iraq.

They showed him with a new(er) Barcelona number 10 jersey, ostensibly Messi's.

According to Miguel Delaney of The Independent, Jose Mourinho has supposedly crafted a six-page letter to the Manchester United hierarchy expressing a desire to manage the struggling outfit.