Messi's MVP Three-Peat Bid Puts MLS Competitive

Bradley Wright-Phillips, who scored more goals for the New York Red Bulls than almost anyone in club history, believes Lionel Messi is on track to win the MLS Golden Boot and the league's Most Valuable Player award again, which would complete the first MVP three-peat in MLS history. The prediction runs through World Soccer Talk, and it has been echoed across syndicated coverage on shango.media and football-addict.com, where the Argentine is described as the driving force behind Inter Miami's season.

Wright-Phillips is a credible messenger on this. He won the Golden Boot himself in 2014 with 27 goals, and he has watched Messi operate in his former league closely enough to have an informed view. CBS Sports has already penciled Messi in for a third straight MVP, noting that the 38-year-old became the first player in league history to win the award in back-to-back seasons.

The question this raises goes beyond whether Messi wins another trophy. It is whether a league built on carefully rationed spending can afford to let one player, on one club, absorb that much of its narrative for a third consecutive year.

The Voting Math is One Thing. the Economics Are Another

MLS MVP voting involves media, players, and club technical staffs, and Messi would likely win any such vote on pure output. When a player who has won more Ballon d'Or awards than the rest of the league's rosters combined turns in an MVP-caliber season, the vote is a formality with a ballot attached.

But the award's meaning is where the tension lives. MLS sells itself on two ideas that pull in opposite directions. The first is parity: the salary cap, the designated player mechanism, and allocation rules exist so that a team in Kansas City can reasonably believe it can compete with a team in Miami. The second is star power: the league spent years constructing the designated player rule precisely so it could afford global icons like David Beckham and, eventually, Messi.

Messi is the purest expression of the second idea. His arrival in 2023 reshaped Inter Miami's commercial profile, drove broadcast interest, and made MLS Season Pass subscriptions a conversation topic in markets that had never discussed them. Apple TV's partnership with the league is built partly on Messi's visibility. Every goal he scores has a revenue line attached to it.

At the same time, his presence concentrates the league's story. When the MVP race is effectively decided before the playoffs begin, the regular season becomes a supporting act. When one club dominates the awards conversation, the other 29 fan bases are being asked to consume a product whose centerpiece they had no realistic chance of acquiring.

What a Designated Player is Actually For

The designated player rule, introduced in 2007 to accommodate Beckham's contract at the LA Galaxy, allows clubs to pay up to three players salaries that exceed the cap, with only a portion counting against the budget. It was designed as a controlled leak in the parity system: enough spending freedom to land stars, not enough to build a superteam.

Inter Miami's roster construction around Messi tests the limits of that compromise. The club surrounds him with other high-profile designated players and veteran talent, and the result has been a team that, when healthy and motivated, has been difficult to beat. Messi's individual brilliance does the rest.

The league's defenders will point out that parity has not died. MLS Cup has been won by a rotating cast of clubs in recent years, and the playoff format remains volatile enough that the best regular-season team frequently does not lift the trophy. Competitive balance in MLS was always about the middle class of the roster, and that middle class remains cap-constrained everywhere, including in Miami.

The critics, and Wright-Phillips's own former club would count among them, can note that Messi's salary reportedly sits in a category of its own, structured through revenue-sharing arrangements with Apple and Adidas that no other player in the league touches. That structure means the most important player in the league is also, in labor terms, the most exceptional one. His compensation is not governed by the same logic as everyone else's. In any workplace, when one worker's deal is untouchable and generational, the collective agreement that binds everyone else starts to look like it has two tiers: one for the league's economics, and one for its marketing plan.

The Voting Question Nobody is Asking Yet

Here is where the three-peat conversation gets uncomfortable for MLS in a productive way. MVP voting has criteria, but they are famously loose: the award does not define whether it honors the best player, the most valuable to his team's results, or the most valuable to the league's bottom line. With Messi, those three answers diverge, and the divergence is the story.

If Messi wins on pure quality, the award tells us what we already know. If a voter decides that another player, perhaps a midfielder anchoring a title contender on a standard contract, better embodies "value," the vote becomes an implicit statement about how much concentration the league can stomach. CBS Sports' preseason superlatives piece reflected the split: Messi for MVP, but it floated the possibility that a teammate, rather than Messi himself, could finish as the league's top scorer, a reminder that Miami's production may spread even while the honors stay concentrated.

The record here is thin on specifics for the 2026 season's final stretch, and it would be misleading to project vote totals or standings with certainty in September. What the record does support, per the sources above, is the trajectory: a first-ever back-to-back winner, a credible former player predicting a third, and a media environment already writing the award's acceptance speech before the ballots go out.

What the League Should Actually Watch

MLS has survived star concentration before. Beckham's Galaxy won consecutive MLS Cups and the league marketed him relentlessly; attendance and ratings rose, and parity purists grumbled without the league suffering lasting damage. The difference is that Beckham arrived at 31 and declined; Messi arrived at 36 and got better, and his contract structure makes him a business partner of the league's broadcast arm as much as an employee of his club.

That last point deserves more attention than it gets. When the league's most valuable player also participates in revenue sharing tied to league-wide subscription performance, the boundary between player and product blurs in a way American sports have mostly avoided. In the NFL, the star quarterback is a worker whose excellence the league profits from. In MLS's current arrangement, the star is closer to a stakeholder whose excellence the league co-invests in. Neither arrangement is illegitimate. Both deserve scrutiny about how they shape incentives, including how awards are covered and voted on.

Wright-Phillips's prediction will probably prove correct. Messi has earned the right to be called the favorite for any award he enters, and a three-peat would be a genuine sporting achievement worthy of the record books. The more open question is whether MLS wants its history books to read like one man's greatest-hits album, or whether the league's next labor and roster negotiation, where designated player slots and salary structures will be on the table again, draws a line between celebrating an icon and building a season around him.

The answer will arrive long after the MVP ballot is counted. It will be written in the collective bargaining sessions, where the players who never got a revenue-sharing deal will have their own vote.

By Denise Okafor-Williams