Lionel Messi won the 2024 Major League Soccer Most Valuable Player award despite missing half the MLS season due to injury, tax management and international duties.
MLS announced Friday that Messi handed Columbus Crew forward Cucho Hernández the honor in his first full season with Inter Miami.
Messi won 38.4% of the total votes, against Cucho’s 33.7%; no other player earned more than 10%.
Messi was the choice of 40.8% of his fellow players, 43.2% of selected media members and 31.3% of the club’s coaching staff – alone among the three groups, each accounting for 33.3% of the weighted votes, which did not make it Messi is his first choice.
Portland Timbers forward Evander finished third with 9.2% of the votes; DC United striker Christian Benteke, the league’s top scorer, finished fourth with 7.1%; Luis Suárez, Messi’s teammate and old friend from Inter Miami, finished fifth with 2.2%.
Messi won the award for scoring 20 goals and 11 assists in 19 MLS regular-season games. He started just 15 games and logged just 47% of available minutes, but he still scored more goals than anyone in the league – even those who played in all 34 regular season games.
His opponents in the MVP debate cited his frequent absences. Messi missed time in the spring with a muscle injury, in June and July during the Copa América with the Argentina national team, and in August and September after an ankle injury in the Copa América final.
Critics also noted that Inter Miami’s results were almost as good without Messi (2.13 points per game) as with him (2.21 PPG).
But the case for Messi was clear. From his arrival in 2023 through 2024, he transformed Inter Miami from a cellar dweller to the best team in the league. 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 was still among the best full seasons in the competition’s history. Counting his five secondary assists – which MLS counts but most of global football does not – Messi’s contributions were the fifth most in a single MLS campaign with 36 goals.
His contributions of 2.2 goals per 90 minutes were of course by far the most in competition history. Stripping out secondary assists, his rate was still an absurd 1.87 per 90 – more than half a goal better than the season rate of any other player in MLS history, according to FBref. In some of the competition’s 28 previous seasons, Messi’s performance would have been more than twice as productive as that of the league leaders.
So he won the MVP award, but not by a landslide. His margin was the smallest of any MLS MVP of the past decade.
He is believed to be the first player in the history of major American sports to win an MVP, even though he started less than half of his team’s games and missed a total of more than 40% of them (excluding baseball pitchers, who typically only start once every five games). ).
Messi’s play-offs ended early, with a stunning first-round defeat at the hands of Atlanta United. But the MVP is a regular season award. And over 34 games, 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 about 100 kids from Inter Miami’s youth teams, all decked out in their pink uniforms and chanting “MVP.”
In a short speech, Messi called the award and reception an “honor” and told the children: “I would have liked to receive this award in a different situation, because at the [MLS Cup] final [this] Saturday. But that’s also what football is all about: overcoming yourself every day. We had a big dream to become MLS champions this year. That didn’t happen, but next year we’ll come back stronger to try again.”
