Moments after the Super Bowl ended this month, Lionel Messi appeared on television screens across America alongside a message. “When football ends, fútbol begins,” the Apple TV advertisement read, teasing the start of Major League Soccer’s 30th season on Saturday.

It’s no surprise Messi was front and center in the league’s marketing. Beyond leading Inter Miami to an MLS-record 74 regular-season points last year and collecting MVP honors, the 37-year-old Argentine superstar is the financial engine supercharging his club’s growth, to a league-leading $180 million in revenue and $50 million in operating income in 2024, according to Forbes estimates.

The Messi effect has rippled across the rest of MLS as well. The league has more than doubled its subscriber count on Apple TV since he jumped from Paris Saint-Germain in 2023, and it saw a 13% bump in sponsorship revenue in 2024, to $665 million, according to research firm SponsorUnited. And any club lucky enough to host Messi for a match—such as Sporting Kansas City, which moved its April 2024 match against Inter Miami to Arrowhead Stadium and ended up with club-record attendance of 72,610—can expect a massive gate-revenue increase.

But while the rising tide is lifting the whole league—to an average value of $690 million, up 121% since 2019—it hasn’t yet produced a change at the front of the fleet. For the third straight year, LAFC is MLS’s most valuable team, worth an estimated $1.25 billion, just ahead of No. 2 Inter Miami at $1.2 billion. The LA Galaxy, No. 3 at $1 billion, become the league’s third team in the three-comma club.

LAFC has grown reliably each year, striking a 10-year, $100 million stadium naming rights deal six months before Messi’s arrival and cultivating an active schedule at its BMO Stadium with concerts and other events. Still, with an estimated $150 million in 2024 revenue and $12 million in operating income, the club doesn’t quite reach the financial heights of Inter Miami, which has doubled its valuation in just two years.

So with Inter Miami’s robust season-ticket sales, a global preseason tour that stretched from El Salvador to Saudi Arabia, and a long list of new corporate partners—including Royal Caribbean, JPMorgan Chase and Duracell—why isn’t Messi’s team MLS’s most valuable?

The answer comes down to an unresolved question, one that is also largely responsible for the league’s growth slowdown to 5%, after a 14% jump in the average team value in 2024. To put it simply: What is going to happen to Inter Miami’s, and MLS’s, finances when Messi leaves, whether that is when his contract expires after this season or when he inevitably retires in the next few years?

Team owner Jorge Mas told Forbes last year that he’s “highly confident” Messi will return for 2026, when Inter Miami is slated to move into a 25,000-seat stadium as part of the $1 billion Miami Freedom Park project, but just in case, the club is solidifying its financial foundation by locking down sponsorships and luxury suite commitments in contracts that run for as long as a decade. There is precedent in MLS for revenue to slide backward after a star’s departure, however, such as when David Beckham left the Galaxy in 2012.

“It’s not apples to apples because MLS was in a different space back then relative to now, but you’re going to see a bit of a drop-off,” says Edwin E. Draughan, a partner at sports investment bank Park Lane. “The question is how much of a drop-off post-Messi, and a lot of that is going to be dependent on how the team at Inter Miami continues to engage with their fan base and continues to deliver a great experience.”

Ultimately, if Inter Miami and the rest of MLS’s clubs are going to justify their soaring valuations and get firmly into the black—with 16 teams still operating at a loss, according to Forbes estimates—the league will need to start buttressing against that sort of variance by generating real revenue at the national level. And while there are tailwinds from the 2026 World Cup, being played on American soil, and from the revamped Leagues Cup, an annual competition featuring clubs from MLS and Mexico’s Liga MX, that hope primarily hangs on another open question: the league’s media rights deal.

MLS’s 10-year pact with Apple, signed in 2023 after the league rolled up its local and national broadcast rights, came with an average annual value of $250 million, shy of the $300 million the league reportedly sought. The figure is also far short of what more mature leagues like the NFL ($12.4 billion) and the NBA ($6.9 billion) will collect from their new national TV packages, and making matters worse, MLS is responsible for production costs that can run $80 million per year. The meager war chest leaves clubs on the hook for multimillion-dollar capital calls to cover league expenses each year.

MLS does have ancillary TV deals with Fox, TSN and RDS, and its Apple deal allows the league to earn more than the base rate through revenue sharing based on subscription numbers. Early projections suggested MLS could reach that point in the fourth or fifth year of the deal, and Messi’s arrival stoked expectations that it could happen sooner. That hasn’t been the case, however, and complementary subscriptions—for season-ticket holders and T-Mobile customers, among others—represent a large chunk of MLS Season Pass’ two million users.

Even with the service’s 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. window averaging more than a million unique viewers in 2024, many clubs privately voice complaints. “If you’re at home at night and you’re on Hulu or YouTube, you don’t find us,” says one MLS team executive. “Apple is very destination based. It’s not a casual streaming platform. That’s the challenge: How do we get to a bigger audience?”

MLS is taking steps to expand access in 2025, putting 210 matches in front of its paywall and creating a weekly Sunday Night Soccer broadcast that is free to watch. In addition, Comcast Xfinity and DirecTV now distribute MLS Season Pass directly, and the Apple TV app is finally available on Android devices. MLS has also struck a social media deal with TikTok and is releasing a documentary series from the production company behind Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive To Survive.

At the same time, at the local level, MLS’s attendance has been trending upward across the board—rising 4% in 2024 in matches that did not involve Inter Miami—and a number of clubs are making gains independently of Messi. For instance, Austin FC (No. 6 on the valuation list at $825 million) has built an enviable season-ticket base, and FC Cincinnati (No. 10, $730 million) is among the league leaders with its revenue from premium seating despite playing in a smaller market. Meanwhile, the Columbus Crew (No. 9, $735 million) saw year-over-year appreciation of 15%—MLS’s sharpest climb outside of Inter Miami’s 17%—and are strong in virtually every revenue category.

Executives across the league are also optimistic that player transfers can become a more significant revenue stream. According to soccer database Transfermarkt, MLS generated nearly $250 million in player sales across the most recent summer and winter transfer windows, which was nearly double the next-best mark in league history and included nine deals with fees of $10 million or greater.

“From a league health perspective, that does seem to bode pretty well for the growth and the quality of the on-field play,” Park Lane’s Draughan says. “From a valuation perspective, I think the jury’s still out. I would still wait to see a consistent trend of growing value there.”

To rank the most valuable Major League Soccer franchises, Forbes examined recent transaction data, reviewed publicly available financial information and spoke to more than 50 team executives, owners, investment bankers and industry insiders. All published figures are Forbes estimates.

Revenue and operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) reflect the 2024 season. Playoff games, player transfers and shared distributions from MLS were excluded from revenue calculations.

Team values include the economics of the team’s stadium (including non-MLS revenue that accrues to the team’s owner) but not the value of the stadium real estate itself. Values also include ancillary revenue streams that are captured in the team’s financial statements but exclude other businesses or assets with separate financial statements.

Expansion club San Diego FC, which begins play this year, was omitted from the ranking.