Webby is right. There is no good evidence supporting the general efficacy of massage for athletes, but there are a lot of things to keep in mind:
- "Massage" is not a modality like ice or NSAIDs that can be easily controlled. There are a ton of different massage techniques, and practitioners within different schools will still apply massage in very different ways.
- There are a ton of potential uses for massage, so just because studies looking at, for instance, general inflammation don't show results doesn't mean that particular types of massage don't produce results for particular use cases.
- There may be a placebo effect to massage, but in the context of athletics, the term "placebo" is somewhat slippery. We aren't a body and a brain; we're a complete organism, and the body and brain are tightly integrated. So it's probably a mistake to think of placebos as "fake." For instance, anything that reduces the sensation of pain is by definition a functional pain reliever, even if we don't understand why it works.
For my money, I find two basic uses for massage:
1) I think a general full body sports massage is useful at releasing tension, in the sense that your nervous system relaxes and reduces the activation of muscles. Short stretches (30 seconds, as opposed to the 3-minutes or so you need to actually increase flexibility) can do the same thing. If you have the range of motion you need, but you're in pain because you're tense, massage can help.
2) The other use I find pretty compelling is breaking up specific knots and adhesions in the muscle. This works best with Active Release Therapy, which you can actually do yourself. Find the knot, put a lot of pressure on it, and then move the muscle instead of the lacrosse ball or whatever you're using. Sometimes it's descibed as "flossing" the muscle. I don't know about the research behind it, but I find the anecdotal support so compelling that I don't question that this works.
Your injury does not sound to me like a promising candidate for massage. If it's actually an inflammed, soft tissue injury (a small tear), then you probably just need time. If you have a major competition coming up, then you MIGHT consider getting prescription anti-inflammatories. They will probably make you so tired as to be non-functional for a few days, but they are magic at reducing inflammation. They will NOT help the underlying injury, so they're risky. The inflammation has a purpose. It helps you to heal, but it also makes it harder for you to exercise, so you won't make it worse. Removing the inflammation will remove a major barrier to exercising, but it also removes the safety rails. I've done it once. I went from not being able to run more than 3 miles to making it 16 miles at MP before dropping out. From mile 13-16 I could tell I was aggravating it, so I dropped out before it got too bad. So in my experience it worked, but it wasn't the answer either. I needed more time.