MLS is bracing for the day Lionel Messi eventually walks away from the league, and even though the 2026 World Cup proved the 39-year-old can still go toe-to-toe with the sport’s brightest young stars, the league isn’t waiting until his retirement to plan for what comes next.
According to The Athletic, MLS owners are set to hear a presentation this week on a significant overhaul of the league’s roster rules, centered around a far more open salary cap structure.
The board of governors will meet Wednesday in Charlotte, just ahead of the MLS All-Star Game against Liga MX, with the league’s sporting and competition committee expected to present a preliminary proposal that would remove many of the current restrictions on how teams spend across their rosters.
Reworking spending rules is being treated as the last, and arguably toughest, box left to check in that broader plan. “It’s a must-do; it’s not a maybe-do,” commissioner Don Garber told The Athletic in the run-up to the World Cup final. “… And that’s not ripping everything up that got us here. It’s evolving it. It’s making a couple of bold steps“.
Lionel Messi and Rodrigo De Paul during an Inter Miami’s game. (Getty Images)
There’s genuine urgency behind all this. As Messi’s runway in the league gets shorter, MLS has to show it can keep pulling in marquee international talent without hinging its visibility on one man.
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Complicating matters, any rule changes will almost certainly need to be woven into a new labor deal with the MLS Players Association, whose existing agreement doesn’t expire until January 2028 — a tight runway if the league wants everything squared away before the calendar flip in 2027.
Keeping the Designated Player slot intact
Loosening the rules doesn’t mean scrapping everything, and there’s wide consensus that the Designated Player structure has to stick around in some fashion.
“You have to keep DPs, in my opinion, because you can’t have a rule structure that will prevent you from signing the next Messi or Son (Heung-min),” one chief soccer officer said in an anonymous survey conducted by The Athletic. “So you would need to keep that. But then, essentially, I would like to see the salary cap work where we can invest in players across our entire roster, rather than just a handful of players and then let teams pick their strategy“.
The wave of stars that followed Messi to MLS
Messi’s arrival back in 2023 kicked off a run of blockbuster signings that’s only accelerated since. LAFC broke the league’s transfer fee record to land Son Heung-Min from Tottenham for $26.5 million, while Inter Miami itself added Rodrigo De Paul for a $15 million fee and, more recently, Casemiro.
Thomas Muller joined the Vancouver Whitecaps and Robert Lewandowski made the jump to MLS as well, though he ended up at Chicago Fire rather than reuniting with Messi in Miami as many had speculated.
Antoine Griezmann has also made the move, joining Orlando City as another marquee name betting on MLS’s next chapter. Between all of that, the league has built exactly the kind of star-studded depth it hopes can carry it once Messi eventually moves on.
