The 2025 MLS season is dead. Long live 2026!
With the 30th MLS Cup in the books, it's again time to unleash our way-too-early contenders for next year’s crown. This time, instead of limiting ourselves to five and a darkhorse candidate, I’ve felt the need to expand the list a bit since as many as eight teams have truly compelling cases to be standing in the winner’s circle 12 months from now.
A caveat: I have predicted four of the past seven Supporters’ Shield winners. I have, however, predicted only two of the past seven MLS Cup winners (including this year’s champions, Inter Miami CF). Calling this thing correctly a year ahead of time is tough, tough work, so take the below with a big old grain of salt.
There are three teams outside the top five that I had to give a quick mention to, given their play in 2025 and potential for more in 2026. Think of this as the “not actual favorites, but nobody should be surprised” tier:
- The 2024 champion LA Galaxy are getting Riqui Puig back and, for the first time, will have a roster largely free from the misadventures of the previous front office regime. If Riqui’s 100%, then this should be the deepest and best Galaxy team since 2014.
- San Diego FC blew expectations completely out of the water in 2025, and have plenty of salary cap room, premium roster slots and General Allocation Money (GAM) to get better in 2026. And boy, those Mo Salah whispers sure are starting to get fun.
- At their best in 2025, Nashville SC were as good as basically anyone. The main issue was a lack of depth that limited their ability to compete on multiple fronts (they need some playmaking as well, to be clear). They’ve got the flexibility this winter to address all of it, which they’ve already done at center back.
I’m going to preemptively ask you to stop laughing at me, but… the San Jose Earthquakes are a fun pick for the sickos. They have an easy upgrade to make (in goal, where Daniel was largely disappointing this year), they have a lot of young players on the right part of the improvement curve, they can add several match-winners at premium spots, and they have had good (not great, but good) underlying numbers.
Plus, in head coach Bruce Arena, they have the guy who wrote the book on winning this thing. Another 20-point year-over-year improvement sure looks reachable, and once you’re around a 60-point regular-season team, you’re clearly at least something of an MLS Cup candidate.
I don’t actually think this will happen, but there are at least some arguments you can make.
Ok, and now for our countdown:
Why they’ll win it
The way Seattle played this past year, from the start of the FIFA Club World Cup through the end of Leagues Cup, was as good as anybody played in MLS at any point during the season. It wasn’t just that they were winning games (or, against the likes of Botafogo, PSG and Atlético Madrid, staying in games against some of the best teams in the world): it was the fact that they were playing with both fearlessness and composure against all comers.
Seattle would get the right back up, pinch the wingers into the half spaces, have the center forward (whether Danny Musovski, Jordan Morris or Osaze De Rosario) pin the opposing center backs, and then release not only their No. 10 but also one of their d-mids to attack off-ball through the lines. This worked game after game after game, whether they had their full complement of starters or virtually none.
It was relentless and overwhelming. They crushed Cruz Azul – this year's Concacaf Champions Cup winners – 7-0 in the biggest victory an MLS team has ever registered over a LIGA MX side. Later, they crushed Inter Miami, 3-0, in the final.
No reason to think that team can’t exist again at this time next year.
Why they won’t
The refrain on the Sounders ever since their landmark 2022 CCC title was that they were as solid as anyone in the league – their defensive record attested to exactly that – but they lacked the sort of top-end match-winners necessary to be considered among the favorites in any sort of knockout competition.
We saw it one tournament after another over the course of the 2023 and 2024 seasons. And then this year, down the stretch and into the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs, their ability to grit out close, defensive wins abandoned them.
Maybe they really are just a pretty good, 55-point team that got hot for a couple of months.
Why they’ll win it
They came within a single point of winning the 2025 Supporters’ Shield, so they can be pretty good even when they’re not actually pretty good. That’s who Cincy were all year long – a team that got good results without ever actually playing all that well.
Obviously, it all came home to roost in their Eastern Conference Semifinals whuppin’ at the hands of Inter Miami. You can rely upon superior firepower against a lot of teams (which, to be clear, Cincy have against any non-Miami team in MLS) and still survive. Against Lionel Messi & Friends? Your season is about to crash and burn.
Anyway, most of that firepower will be back next season and should benefit from a season's worth of chemistry and continuity. There is every reason to think they’ll improve, and given head coach Pat Noonan’s track record of building high-level defensive sides, it stands to reason they’ll improve even more on that side of the ball.
Why they won’t
I mean, for one, they might not. It’s entirely possible Cincy’s time as an elite defensive unit came to an end when Matt Miazga got injured in the middle of 2024. They haven’t been the same team since then, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s a coincidence.
The other thing… Evander’s now taken the field five times in two trips to the playoffs across 2024 and 2025. He’s got zero goals and one assist.
Hard to win matches if your biggest match-winner doesn’t show up in the biggest games.
Why they’ll win it
The Black & Gold found an elite gear almost instantly upon the arrival of Son Heung-Min in August. They went 8W-1L-4D across all competitions – including the playoffs – with him in the lineup. Along the way, they registered a +17 goal differential.
Son and Denis Bouanga together form one of the best one-two punches in league history. Remember how close they came to knocking off the ‘Caps in Vancouver?
Obviously, the Soccer Gods wanted Vancouver to win that one. Believe me, I get it.
But after sleepwalking through the first half of that game and digging a 2-0 ditch, LAFC were terrifying for the rest of that game. I think that’s the real version of them, and with a full year of Son, a slightly modified defense and perhaps a little bit more playmaking in midfield… honestly, third on this list might be too low.
Why they won’t
Will there actually be more playmaking on the field, be it in midfield or on the right wing? Or perhaps a new game model – a return to the 4-3-3 with fullbacks flying forward to create the types of wide overloads and endline pullbacks that the Sounders feasted upon?
That’s what we saw against Vancouver in the second half of that Western Conference Semifinal – a game which, I can not emphasize enough, was one of the five best I’ve ever seen in MLS. Just incredible stuff.
But LAFC, under now-former head coach Steve Cherundolo, rarely inflicted that level of play on opponents; they only hit it when they absolutely needed to. It was always in there, mind you. They just showed it sporadically.
Will LAFC, under new head coach Marc Dos Santos, be different? I’m not sure! Dos Santos has been an excellent assistant for the past few years and has had his moments as a head coach, but it’s not clear if he’ll take the shackles off and let this team be the type of front-foot protagonist they probably need to be to hit that final level.
Why they’ll win it
Over the course of the entire 2025 season, Vancouver were the best team in MLS. Period.
They became the first team in MLS history to make three finals, getting all the way to the last game of the CCC and MLS Cup Playoffs, and in between winning their fourth straight Canadian Championship. They had the best xG differential in the league, and came within three points of winning the Supporters’ Shield despite the type of workload (53 games) that has traditionally annihilated teams in this league (I still think 2024 Columbus are the best team I’ve ever seen in MLS, but they wilted after making two finals; Vancouver kept winning).
They lost their best player for two-thirds of the season. They lost their best defender at the midway point, and then lost the guy who became their best defender after that first guy was lost in the weeks after that. Then they lost the defenders they brought in to replace those defenders.
They incorporated a new best player. They survived the prolonged absence of their best goalscorer and then the prolonged absence of his backup. They developed a bunch of homegrown kids, cast-offs and afterthoughts.
They played the type of beautiful, two-way soccer throughout – against all comers – that makes this sport worth living for.
In MLS Cup, they came this close to taking a lead on the road against a Miami team that’s among the very best in this league’s history:
I love this ‘Caps team, man. I’ll be randomly thinking of them a decade from now, as I do of 2011 Real Salt Lake or the 2001 Miami Fusion.
Why they won’t
Because Messi plays for another team.
Why they’ll win it
On a week-to-week, game-to-game basis, Messi is still one of the four or five best players in the world.
On a big-game basis? In a tournament setting? All due respect to Lamine Yamal or Kylian Mbappé, I’m still taking Messi.
The team around him will be better next year – younger, faster, more equipped to run and work for him off the ball so that he can make the kind of magic on it that only he and Maradona have ever dreamed of.
Beyond that, let’s give credit to head coach Javier Mascherano for finding a level of field balance and pitch control with some late-season adjustments. That made Miami a much tougher out from a defensive point of view, and if you build that kind of functional system around Messi, he either 1) wins you games himself, or 2) puts the game on a platter for a teammate to win.
As so:
Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba (and potentially Luis Suárez) went out on a high. Those guys will be replaced with younger, high-level players, and it’s a good bet that Tomás Avilés will be upgraded as well.
That’s a lot of premium roster churn. In a good way.
Why they won’t
I can come up with two reasons. One is, I think, pretty good, and one is kind of meh. Here’s the meh one:
I think they really, really cared about MLS Cup this year, more than they cared about any of the other trophies they were playing for. That doesn’t mean they didn’t care about CCC or Leagues Cup – they clearly did – but I got the impression that, after last year’s Round One exit to Atlanta United, this was Priority No. 1.
I am 1,000% convinced that next year’s Priority No. 1 will be lifting the CCC trophy. And historically, we’ve seen that just making it to the CCC final is enough to hamstring most MLS teams, while the one MLS team that actually won CCC in its modern iteration (2022 Seattle) cratered the rest of that season and actually missed the playoffs.
I don’t expect that to happen to Miami. But it’s plausible, at least, that they empty the tanks in May and can’t find the same gear the rest of the season.
The good one is this: No one’s repeated as MLS Cup champs in the Targeted Allocation Money (TAM) era. I actually thought this was the “meh” one, but if you think about it, in order to go back-to-back in this version of MLS, you need to be playing high-level, winning soccer for 20 out of 22 months (February of one year to December of the next). For Miami, that would likely entail… 110 games over that timespan? Maybe 115? And that’s before you factor in the wear-and-tear of Messi and a few others on international duty.
I’m picking them anyway. But Messi, Rodrigo De Paul, et al better rest now because I don’t think they’re getting much in 2026.
