Lionel Messi Joins Only David Beckham on Ballon d’Or Shortlist While Playing in MLS

• Lionel Messi has been nominated for the 2026 Ballon d’Or, becoming the only active MLS player on the 30-man shortlist.
• The nomination follows Messi’s MLS Cup title with Inter Miami, a second straight MLS MVP award, and a run to the FIFA World Cup final with Argentina.
• Messi already made history this year by becoming the first player in MLS history to record 30-plus goal contributions in three different seasons.

The Numbers Behind His Case: 18 Goals, 12 Assists and a Third Straight 30-Contribution Season

Lionel Messi is 39 years old, playing his club football in Major League Soccer, and he is still on the shortlist for the biggest individual prize in the sport. Inter Miami confirmed on Tuesday that Messi had been named among the 30 nominees for the 2026 Ballon d’Or, selected by France Football. He is the only active MLS player on the list.

Through his first three games of September, Messi leads MLS with 18 goals and 12 assists this season. That tally has already made him the first player in league history to produce 30 or more goal contributions in three separate seasons, a record no other player in MLS history, American or international, has managed even once.

A Nomination Built on a Historic Year

The case for Messi’s nomination was built well before this season kicked off. He won MLS Cup 2025 with Inter Miami, the club’s first league title, beating Vancouver Whitecaps FC 3-1 in the final. In the playoffs that led up to that final, Messi set a league record with 15 goal contributions, six goals and nine assists, and was named MLS Cup MVP for his performance. He then followed it by winning the Landon Donovan MLS MVP award for a second straight year.

Messi added a deep World Cup run with Argentina on top of that domestic haul. He led his country to the 2026 FIFA World Cup final this summer, recording eight goals and four assists across eight games and directly taking part in 12 of Argentina’s 19 goals at the tournament. He finished just short of Kylian Mbappe’s 10 goals and four assists in the race for the Golden Boot. The World Cup also marked Messi’s last appearance for the Argentina national team, closing out his international career at a sixth and final tournament.

Messi’s Farewell to Argentina

Messi confirmed his international retirement in the days after the final, closing the book on 125 goals and a national-team appearance record built over two decades. “It was a decision that hurt, and still hurts deep down, but I understand that the time has come,” he wrote. The World Cup nomination for the Ballon d’Or arrives just as that chapter closes, giving Messi a shortlist appearance to weigh against a season in which he won MLS Cup with Inter Miami and reached one more major final with Argentina before stepping away from the national team for good.

Only Beckham Has Done This Before

Being nominated for the Ballon d’Or while playing in MLS has happened before, but it is rare enough that only one other player in history has managed it. David Beckham was named to the Ballon d’Or shortlist in 2007 after his move to LA Galaxy, though he did not go on to win it. Beckham’s nomination came the same year France Football expanded voting eligibility beyond players at European clubs, opening the award to competitions outside the continent for the first time. He finished the vote without picking up a single point, with Kaka winning that year instead. The winner this year will be decided by one voter from each of the top 100 FIFA-ranked nations, each ranking their top 10 players from the shortlist on a points system running from 15 down to one. That structure means Messi needs support spread across dozens of federations rather than a concentrated vote from a handful of major footballing nations, an approach that worked in his favor throughout his run of previous wins. Messi is the first player to win the award itself while an active MLS player, a feat he achieved in 2023 following his move to Inter Miami. This nomination puts him back in that same exclusive company, competing for an award most MLS observers assumed would never again be within reach for a player based in the league.

Messi has now won the Ballon d’Or a record eight times, more than any other player in the award’s history, with his most recent win coming in 2023 after Argentina’s World Cup triumph in Qatar. He will compete this year against a field that includes 2026 World Cup winner Rodri of Spain, France’s Kylian Mbappe, Norway’s Erling Haaland, and England’s all-time leading scorer Harry Kane, among a 30-man shortlist that spans nearly every major league in the world.

Still Producing at 39

What separates this nomination from Messi’s earlier ones is simply his age. He is already the most decorated player in the sport’s history, with 46 trophies won across his career at Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Miami. Most players who reach that level of accomplishment by their late 30s are winding down, chasing appearance fees in a league without the physical demands of Europe’s top divisions. Messi’s numbers this season suggest the opposite. In Miami’s title-winning 2025 campaign he produced 29 goals and 19 assists in just 28 regular-season matches to win the MLS Golden Boot outright, and he has kept that level of production going into the current campaign.

The Ballon d’Or ceremony, the 70th edition of the award, will take place on October 26 at the London Palladium Theatre, the first time the event has been staged outside Paris. The 30-man shortlist was compiled by journalists from France Football, and the winner is decided by a single voting journalist from each of the top 100 FIFA-ranked nations, with each voter ranking their top 10 players from the list on a points scale.

What It Means for MLS

For a league that has spent two decades trying to convince the rest of the football world it belongs in the same conversation as Europe’s top divisions, Messi’s nomination is a marketing moment as much as a personal one. It puts an MLS player’s name on a list alongside Rodri, Mbappe, Haaland and Kane, voted on by journalists in over 100 countries who will now have to watch Messi’s Inter Miami highlights alongside Champions League footage before casting a ballot. Beckham’s arrival in 2007 was billed as the moment that would change how the world saw MLS. Messi’s nomination this week is proof that, nearly two decades later, the league finally has a player whose season competes with the best in the world, not just as a marketing story but as a football one.

Whether Messi adds a ninth Ballon d’Or to his collection in October or finishes behind Rodri, Mbappe or Kane, the nomination itself closes out a stretch of his career that once looked like a victory lap and instead produced a genuine record book entry: the first player in MLS history to put together three seasons of 30 or more goal contributions, at an age when most of his rivals from a decade ago have already retired.

How the Vote Works

Ballon d’Or voters are asked to weigh three factors when filling out their ballots: individual performance across the season, team success, and what France Football calls “class and fair play.” For Messi, the first two boxes are easy to tick. He won a league title and an MVP award domestically, then took Argentina to a World Cup final on top of it. The vote is decided by a points system, with each of the 100 voting journalists ranking 10 players from the shortlist and points awarded on a sliding scale from 15 down to one for each ranking spot. Ties are broken by the number of first-place votes a player receives, then by second-place votes, and so on down the list.

A Career of Ballon d’Or Wins Most Players Never Approach

Messi’s eight Ballon d’Or wins came in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2019, 2021 and 2023, spanning three different clubs and stretching across more than a decade of his career. No other player has won the award more than five times. His most recent win, in 2023, arrived the year after he finally lifted the World Cup with Argentina in Qatar, closing the one gap left on his résumé at international level. This year’s nomination arrives after he has closed the book on his international career entirely, with the 2026 World Cup final marking the last appearance of his time with the national team.

Inter Miami’s roster around Messi has changed considerably in the years after his 2023 arrival, but the club has built a squad capable of winning silverware rather than simply selling shirts with his name on the back. Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba remain regular starters alongside him, while Miami’s playoff run last season showed a team that could win games without Messi carrying every attacking sequence himself. His numbers still dwarfed everyone else on the field.