Why Messi Is Favored to Win a Third Straight MLS MVPLionel Messi finished the 2026 MLS regular season with 26 goals and 17 assists, becoming the first player in league history to win back-to-back Golden Boots. Finalists for the Landon Donovan MVP award are being revealed this week, and Messi enters as the heavy favorite to win a third straight trophy — something no player in MLS history has done.What happened: the numbers behind the favorite tagMessi’s 2026 regular season closed with a league-high 43 goal contributions, finishing four goals clear of FC Dallas striker Petar Musa and five ahead of Nashville’s Sam Surridge in the scoring race. He also notched 17 assists, trailing only Charlotte’s Pep Biel for the league lead in that category. Inter Miami, meanwhile, finished third in the Eastern Conference — well short of the Supporters’ Shield, which Nashville SC claimed with a league-record points total.Why the gap between team and individual results doesn’t hurt his caseMLS MVP voting splits evenly between club technical staff, players and media, and the award has historically tracked individual output more closely than team silverware. That pattern favors Messi again this year. Carlos Vela won MVP in 2019 without a Shield or Cup, and Messi’s own 2025 MVP arrived on a Miami team that finished third in the East before a late playoff run to the title.Surridge and Hany Mukhtar can point to Nashville’s historic points tally, and Brian White has a strong goals-per-90 case for Vancouver. But no challenger matches Messi’s combination of scoring volume, chance creation and MLS’s own metric of goal contributions, the stat the league has repeatedly used to frame the MVP conversation. Mukhtar and Surridge’s campaigns strengthen the ballot field without changing the top line: Messi led the league in total output for a second consecutive year, this time at age 39 and in a season that also included Argentina’s run to the World Cup final.What it means: history, workload and the road to 2028A third MVP would make Messi the only player in MLS history to win the award in three separate seasons, pulling clear of Preki, the only other two-time winner. It would also extend a run that began in his first full season with Miami in 2024 and has continued through a World Cup cycle without any visible drop in production — a workload data point clubs across the league will track as Messi’s contract runs through 2028.For MLS, the significance is less about the trophy and more about continuity. A third straight MVP keeps the league’s most marketable storyline — Messi outproducing a league that has grown around him — intact heading into a 2027 season where expansion, new rivals and a deeper Golden Boot field will eventually test whether this run has a ceiling.
