Lionel Messi won Major League Soccer’s 2024 Most Valuable Player award despite missing half the MLS season due to injury, load management and international duty.
MLS announced Friday that Messi edged Columbus Crew forward Cucho Hernández to the honor in his first full season with Inter Miami.
Messi won 38.4% of the aggregate vote to Cucho’s 33.7%; no other player earned more than 10%.
Messi was the choice for 40.8% of his fellow players, 43.2% of select media members, and 31.3% of club technical staff — the only one of the three groups, which each account for 33.3% of the weighted vote, that did not make Messi its top choice.
Portland Timbers forward Evander finished third with 9.2% of votes; D.C. United striker Christian Benteke, the league’s top goalscorer, finished fourth with 7.1%; Luis Suárez, Messi’s Inter Miami teammate and longtime friend, finished fifth with 2.2%.
Messi won the award because, in the 19 MLS regular-season games he did play, he tallied 20 goals and 11 assists. He started only 15 games and logged only 47% of available minutes, but he still created more goals than anybody else in the league — even those who played in all 34 regular-season matches.
His detractors in the MVP debate cited his frequent absences. Messi missed time in the spring with a muscle injury, in June and July while at Copa América with the Argentina national team, and in August and September after suffering an ankle injury in the Copa América final.
Critics also noted that Inter Miami’s results were nearly as good without Messi (2.13 points per game) as with him (2.21 PPG).
But the case for Messi was clear. From his 2023 arrival through 2024, he transformed Inter Miami from a cellar-dweller into the league’s best team. In 2024, they broke the MLS single-season points record and won the Supporters’ Shield with weeks to spare.
And individually, Messi’s half-season still ranked among the best full seasons in league history. Factoring in his five secondary assists — which MLS counts, but most of global soccer does not — Messi’s 36 goal contributions were the fifth-most in a single MLS campaign.
His 2.2 goal contributions per 90 minutes were, of course, by far the most in league history. Removing secondary assists, his rate was still an absurd 1.87 per 90 — more than a half-goal better than any other player’s single-season rate in MLS history, per FBref. In fact, in several of the league’s 28 previous seasons, Messi’s rate would have been more than twice as prolific as the league leader.
So he won the MVP award — though not in a landslide. His margin was the thinnest of any MLS MVP over the past decade.
He is believed to be the first player in the history of major U.S. sports to win an MVP while starting less than half of his team’s games and missing more than 40% of them altogether (excluding baseball pitchers, who typically start only once every five games).
Messi’s playoffs ended early, with a stunning first-round upset at the hands of Atlanta United. But the MVP is a regular-season award. And over 34 matches, Messi’s 19 were the most valuable.
He was presented with the MVP trophy at Inter Miami’s Chase Stadium earlier this week. In a video distributed by MLS, he arrived at the stadium to meet MLS commissioner Don Garber and around 100 kids from Inter Miami’s youth teams, all decked out in their pink kits and chanting “M-V-P.”
In a brief speech, Messi called the award and reception an “honor,” and told the kids: “I would have liked to receive this award in another situation, being able to play the [MLS Cup] final [this] Saturday. But that’s also what soccer is about, overcoming yourself every day. We had a big dream of being MLS champions this year. It didn’t happen, but next year we’ll come back stronger to try again.”
