It’s Messi. Repeat, Messi. The Inter Miami star is MLS’ first back-to-back MVP winner

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) – Best player. Best team. Inter Miami’s Lionel Messi is the unquestioned force in Major League Soccer right now, on a run like nobody else the league has ever seen.

The 38-year-old Argentine star – and captain of the MLS Cup champions – has become the first back-to-back MVP in MLS history, getting announced Tuesday as this year’s winner of the league’s top individual honor.

Messi – thanking his teammates and saying he couldn’t have won the award without them – accepted the trophy at the opening ceremony of his Messi Cup youth tournament, which kicked off Tuesday. That’s why the award announcement was delayed until after the season; Messi wanted kids to be part of it.

“He’s a unicorn, man – not just for what he does on the field,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said Tuesday after the on-field ceremony in misty conditions. “He’s just a special man.”

The back-to-back MVPs represent another first for Messi in what seems like a never-ending list of his career accomplishments and was widely expected, almost assumed after he had a league-best 29 goals along with 19 assists during the regular season.

He also becomes just the second two-time MVP the league has ever seen, joining Preki, the winner of the award in 1997 and 2003. The other winners are all one-time MVP recipients.

“He was fantastic the whole season, with the numbers and also with the commitment,” Inter Miami coach and longtime Messi teammate Javier Mascherano said after Saturday’s MLS final.

Messi played in barely half of Inter Miami’s regular-season games in 2024, and that sparked some doubt as to whether he deserved to win the MVP award.

He won a close vote last year. This year, there was no debate.

Messi got 70.4% of the total vote – the biggest winning total since Toronto’s Sebastian Giovinco in 2015. San Diego’s Anders Dreyer was second with 11.2%, followed by LAFC’s Denis Bouanga (7.3%), Cincinnati’s Evander (4.8%) and Nashville’s Sam Surridge (2.4%).

“There’s something about the way he’s wired,” Garber said of Messi while attending an Inter Miami match earlier in this season’s playoffs. “He’s thinking about the game like nobody else ever has. His intensity and desire to win is what makes him the greatest of all time. There are a lot of really competitive players, but he has this special sauce, this dynamic that has him so focused on doing what he needs to do to win games.”

This award joins dozens of other individual honors in Messi’s career, including eight Ballon d’Or titles, eight Pichichi trophies as La Liga’s top scorer, six La Liga best player nods, three Best FIFA Men’s Player awards, three UEFA Men’s Player of the Year wins, two FIFA World Cup Golden Balls and no fewer than 15 selections as Argentina’s best player in a given year. He’s also been part of winning 47 trophies for club and country – including the 2022 World Cup – making him the most decorated player the men’s game has ever seen.

“The reality,” Mascherano said as the regular season was ending, “is that Leo clears all doubts.”

Messi becomes the sixth player in MLS history to win MVP and a championship in the same season. Of the previous five, only Atlanta United’s Josef Martinez in 2018 won MVP, a title and the Golden Boot as the league’s scoring champion all in the same year, another hat trick of sorts that Messi achieved in 2025.

Indeed, there has been no one like him – in MLS for certain, and quite possibly anywhere.

Forget winning back-to-back MVPs. There have been only four players in MLS history – Carlos Valderrama in 1996 and 1997, Marco Etcheverry in 1998 and 1999, David Villa in 2016 and 2017, and Martinez in 2018 and 2019 – to win the award one year and then even be a finalist for MVP in the following season.

And Messi isn’t planning on leaving Miami anytime soon. He’s signed a three-year extension, meaning he’ll be there when Inter Miami – a franchise that has seen its value explode since his arrival 2½ years ago – opens its new stadium near Miami International Airport next season.

“Leo is a winner. It’s simple as that,” Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham said. “And I know that sounds like an easy and an obvious thing to say because of what he’s won. There’s no player that has probably won what he has won and done it the way he’s done it. There’s more to what makes him the greatest than just what he does on the field. I think everyone in Miami, everyone around the MLS, has seen what he’s done for this league and this city and this country. But he continues to raise that level, and that’s what great players do.”

The phenomenon of having a back-to-back MVP has occurred in each of the other major U.S. pro sports leagues in the past plenty of times, with the most recent instance of each happening fairly recently.

In Major League Baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge have won the National League and American League MVP awards, respectively, in each of the last two seasons; Ohtani won the AL MVP award with the Los Angeles Angels in 2023 as well.

A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces has won the WNBA’s MVP award in each of the last two years. Denver’s Nikola Jokic was the most recent NBA player to win MVP back-to-back, doing so in 2021 and 2022. Aaron Rodgers – then of Green Bay – won two straight NFL MVP awards in 2020 and 2021, and Washington’s Alex Ovechkin won the NHL’s Hart Trophy in 2008 and 2009 for the most recent occurrence of someone claiming that award in consecutive years.

But never in MLS – until now.

“Great players always believe that they can win more and raise the level,” Beckham said. “And that’s what Leo’s doing.”