Lionel Messi Scored a Free Kick Against San Diego and Became Only the Second Player in MLS History to Reach 20 Goals in Three Straight Seasons

• Lionel Messi scored his 20th goal of the 2026 MLS season with a curling free kick in Inter Miami’s 2-2 draw with San Diego FC on September 20, making him only the second player in league history to reach 20-plus goals in three straight seasons.
• The only other player to do it is LAFC’s Denis Bouanga, who managed the feat from 2023 to 2025.
• Messi’s free kick also moved him to 101 goals in all competitions for Inter Miami, four days after he scored the club’s 100th in a Campeones Cup final win over Cruz Azul.

A Free Kick That Rewrote the MLS Record Book Again

Inter Miami were trailing San Diego FC deep into their September 20 meeting at Chase Stadium when Lionel Messi stepped up to a free kick, curled it past the wall, and sent it into the net. The goal salvaged a 2-2 draw. It also did something no Inter Miami highlight reel needed to explain twice: it moved Messi to 20 goals for the season, and with it, into a stat line that only one other player in MLS history has produced.

Messi is now the second player to score 20 or more goals in three consecutive MLS seasons. The only name above his in that column belongs to Denis Bouanga of LAFC, who did it from 2023 through 2025. Messi’s run covers 2024, 2025 and 2026, a stretch that has taken him from newly arrived designated player to the most productive scorer in the league.

The free kick against San Diego was his 101st goal in all competitions for Inter Miami, a tally built up after his arrival from Paris Saint-Germain in July 2023. He reached the milestone in unusual fashion for a player whose career has been defined by round numbers and big occasions: goal number 100 came four days earlier, in a different competition entirely, in a match most of his club’s own fans in the United States would have had to search for on a schedule.

The 100th Goal Came in a Trophy Nobody Expected Him to Care About

On September 16, Inter Miami beat Cruz Azul of Liga MX 2-0 to win the Campeones Cup, an annual meeting between the MLS champion and the Liga MX champion that rarely draws the attention given to Messi’s bigger prizes. Messi was named man of the match. He scored the goal that made him a centurion for the club, then set up Casemiro for the second.

It brought Inter Miami’s trophy count under Messi to a record 48, a number that includes MLS silverware, US Open Cup runs and now back-to-back Campeones Cup wins. For a competition that exists mostly as a scheduling curiosity to outsiders, Messi treats it the way he treats everything else with a trophy attached: as something to win.

Four days later, the free kick against San Diego pushed his tally to 101 and delivered the 20-goal, three-season milestone in the same touch of the ball.

The Numbers Behind the Longest Sustained Run of His MLS Career

Messi’s season-by-season regular season record at Inter Miami tells its own story of a player who arrived mid-season in 2023, adjusted within a year, and kept the output climbing every year after that.

• 2023: 1 goal, 2 assists in 6 games
• 2024: 20 goals, 16 assists in 19 games
• 2025: 29 goals, 19 assists in 28 games
• 2026: 20 goals, 13 assists in 23 games, with the season still ongoing

His 33 goal contributions this season put him top of the Golden Boot presented by Audi standings, ahead in both goals and assists individually. With eight regular season games left to play, he already has the two categories that decide the award without needing either one to carry him alone.

There is also an individual award on the horizon that would put Messi in territory no one else has reached. He has won the Landon Donovan MLS MVP twice. A third would make him the first three-time winner in the league’s history, and the eight games remaining are effectively his window to make the case irrefutable.

What Bouanga’s Company Actually Means

Denis Bouanga built his run the hard way. The Gabon international scored 20-plus goals for LAFC in three consecutive seasons from 2023 to 2025 as the focal point of a team built to create and finish chances through him, without the gravity of a global superstar’s name pulling defenses out of shape around him. Messi’s version of the same feat has come with every opposition set up specifically to stop him, double teams and tactical fouls included, in a league where he is, by a distance, the most heavily scouted player on any given team sheet.

That the two men now share a line in the record book says something about how differently this milestone gets reached. Bouanga’s was built on consistency within a system. Messi’s has been built on doing it anyway, regardless of how a match is set up to stop him.

A Broader Season for a Club Still Chasing the Season’s Real Prize

Individual numbers aside, Inter Miami head into the final stretch of the season as the defending MLS Cup presented by Audi champions, and the draw with San Diego was a reminder that the team around Messi has not always matched his output goal for goal. The Campeones Cup, at least, offered proof that the supporting cast can deliver on the biggest occasions: Casemiro’s finish off Messi’s assist was as much a part of that trophy as Messi’s own goal.

With eight games left in the regular season, the MVP conversation, the Golden Boot race and Inter Miami’s push to defend their MLS Cup title are now running on parallel tracks, and Messi’s free kick against San Diego touched all three at once.

Eight Games to Settle Two Arguments

The Golden Boot race is, for now, barely a race. Leading the league outright in both goals and assists at the same time is rare even for MLS’s best forwards, most of whom lean one way or the other. Messi’s 33 combined goal contributions give him breathing room that few chasers can close in eight games, short of an outlier run of form from someone else entirely.

The MVP race remains unsettled: voters weigh team success alongside individual output, and Inter Miami’s form has not matched Messi’s own numbers goal for goal this season. A third MVP award would put him alone at the top of a list that, before this year, had never had a multiple winner reach three.

Closing

Messi turns 39 next year, and every milestone he collects in MLS now carries the faint suggestion that it could be one of the last of its kind. For now, the numbers keep climbing regardless: 101 goals for Inter Miami, 20 in a season for a third year running, and a Golden Boot and MVP case that gets harder to argue against with every game he plays.