Miami's Lionel Messi by the numbers: Inside a record-breaking MVP season

2: consecutive MVP awards

Messi is the first player to win the MLS MVP award twice — and the first to win it in back-to-back seasons. Venezuelan striker Josef Martinez and Mexican attacker Carlos Vela both came close in the late 2010s, but neither pulled if off.

28: non-penalty regular-season goals

Messi scored 29 goals for Miami in the 2025 regular season. That wasn’t a league record — the aforementioned Vela scored a whopping 34 in 2019 — but it’s worth digging a little deeper into those numbers.

Many a Golden Boot winner’s stats have been padded by penalty kicks, and 2019 Vela falls into that category: Nine of his 34 goals were penalties, meaning just 25 came from open play. Messi, meanwhile, scored only one penalty in 2025, giving him 28 goals from open play — a league record.

15: goal contributions in the playoffs

Miami played six playoff games in 2025: three against Nashville in the first round, then one apiece against Cincinnati, NYCFC and Vancouver on the way to lifting the Cup. The team scored 20 goals along the way, setting a record for an MLS playoff run.

No Miami player scored more than Argentine winger Tadeo Allende, who scored nine times in six games (including one in the MLS Cup final). But no Miami player had more total goal contributions — goals and assists combined — than Messi.

Messi scored six goals and set up another nine for a frankly absurd playoff goal-contribution tally of 15. That means he was directly involved in 75% of Miami’s playoff goals and was the central force behind its record-setting run.

62.4: percentage of Miami goals Messi influenced directly

The playoffs, though, were just a small part of Miami and Messi's 2025 run. If you combine them with the regular season, Miami scored 101 goals in total; Messi contributed 63 goals and assists to that tally. No one else in MLS came close to having that level of influence over his team's goal-scoring record. 

8.65: number of goals by which Messi outperformed his own xG

xG, or “expected goals,” is a cumulative statistic that evaluates a player's shots, key passes and shot quality to estimate how many goals he should be scoring. When compared to a player’s actual tally, it offers a fascinating look at whether they’re over-performing or under-performing their underlying numbers.

Take NYCFC's Alonso Martínez, for instance: He scored 17 goals in 2025, but his xG suggested he should’ve scored 23.03. Seventeen goals looks strong in isolation, but his xG indicates he could have — and probably should have — scored more.

Messi found himself at the opposite end of that comparison in 2025. His xG suggested he should’ve scored 20.35, but he put away a whopping 29, outperforming his expected tally by 8.65. Among the league’s top scorers, only one player — FC Cincinnati’s Evander, who scored 18 goals off an expected 8.83 — outperformed their xG by a larger margin.