During the 2023 MLS regular season, FC Cincinnati marched its way to an early Supporters’ Shield celebration with many of the Orange and Blue’s game-changing moments originating from the feet of Luciano Acosta. On paper, Acosta is the best player on the best team — an ironclad MVP candidate. Case closed, right? Not necessarily, especially in a season that featured so many strong individual performances.
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The Landon Donovan MLS MVP award is handed out to reward players for their performance in the regular season. Other competitions, such as the U.S. Open Cup, the Leagues Cup and the CONCACAF Champions League, should not factor into voters’ consideration, according to the league’s official guidance. Teams nominate up to two of their players for the shortlist, which explains how Lionel Messi is up for the honor despite playing fewer than 300 league minutes.
The vote share is evenly split across three camps: current MLS players, MLS sporting staff (head coaches, technical directors and general managers) and select media members representing local and national outlets who consistently covered the 2023 regular season.
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Farcical as Miami’s nomination seemed on the surface, Messi’s presence on the ballot reinforces the importance of sorting this dilemma out: How do we define the most valuable player?
The best player on the best team
No sense in feigning suspense here: let’s start with Acosta. After all, voters have awarded the MVP to a player on the Supporters’ Shield-winning team in two of the last three 34-game seasons (the award was given in 2020, but the season was cut short by COVID-19).
Cincinnati deserves more praise for the season it’s polishing off. Not only did they win the Shield with three games to spare, but they did so just two years after spending a third consecutive season glued to the bottom of the league table. Until their loss at home against the New York Red Bulls on Oct. 4, they had a chance to set a new single-season points record.
At the fore of it all was Acosta, who returned to MLS after two seasons with Atlas in March 2021. As the Argentine playmaker went, so did the FC Cincinnati. On X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), highlights of Acosta’s game-changing moments were frequently shared with sentiments along the lines of “there’s your MVP, case closed” as early as July.
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His case feels eerily similar to Carles Gil’s in 2021 when the midfielder was determined the only MVP front-runner as New England stormed to an eventual single-season points record. The Spaniard eventually won, racking up 52.1% of the vote. It wasn’t so much that Gil was undeserving; rather, the rush to anoint a winner overshadowed the tremendous season enjoyed by Hany Mukhtar. The Nashville SC goal scorer used his snubbing as fuel for an even better campaign en route to winning the 2022 award, receiving 48.03% of the vote.
Acosta has put up numbers worthy of the honor. He leads the league in goals and assists, although that tally is bloated by the seven penalty kicks he has converted. He isn’t leading his team in game-winning goals — Puskas Award nominee Alvaro Barreal owns that title with four — but his five clinching assists trail only Gil and Orlando City playmaker Mauricio Pereyra, who have six each. Acosta is prolific at trying to get his team on the scoreboard, leading MLS in combined shots on goal and chances created among players who have played at least half of the season; Emanuel Reynoso is at a 4.93 clip but has just 1,279 minutes to his name.
Across the board, Acosta has the résumé of a worthy leader of a great MLS side. Still, he isn’t running away with every category like Carlos Vela did in 2019. We may as well leave the conversation open for others to make their cases — and trust me, there are plenty in what’s been a very good season for individual players.
The best player in the league
When voters don’t go for the best guy on the best team, they’ve historically treated this like a “player of the year” contest. It’s how Mukhtar ran away with it in 2022 despite Nashville finishing ninth in the league table. It’s also why Diego Valeri won the award in 2017 even as Toronto FC completed a rare treble-winning season, and why Josef Martínez’s then-record 31 goals won out in 2018 even as the New York Red Bulls narrowly won the Shield over Atlanta United.
In the cases of Mukhtar, Valeri, Martínez and Vela, you knew it when you saw it. They were each “HIM,” as the kids say. This is also where Acosta’s case isn’t quite as ironclad. Depending on what you value, Acosta warrants MVP consideration while also justifying omitting him from the year-end Best XI, as is the case with two of the fellow voters I’ve consulted.
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Unlike past seasons which forced voters to choose four defenders, three midfielders and three forwards regardless of tactical coherency, this year’s MLS Best XI can be in one of six soccer formations.
For those who stick with a 4-3-3, it’s a stacked competition. Do you pick three Number 10s from a league chock-full of them and forgo structural practicality? Do you try to prioritize showing love for defensive midfielders, who are historically underrepresented? For all of their quality for over a decade, Osvaldo Alonso, Kyle Beckerman, Diego Chara and Dax McCarty combined for just three Best XI honors. That’s criminal.
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If you believe MVP must also fit into the Best XI, there are a few options.
Leaving Acosta off of your Best XI would require you to name at least three midfielders who were better in the regular season. One would undoubtedly be Thiago Almada. Signed for a league-record $16 million before last season, the 2022 World Cup winner has thrived in the Number 10 role and catalyzed an emergent season for Atlanta.
Following his role in Argentina’s World Cup triumph, he owned the season’s opening weeks: four games, four goals and four assists. Even as the opposition adapted to his set-piece prowess and penchant for progressive carries, he still leads the league in non-penalty goal contributions and trails only one player in game-winning goal contributions.
Another midfielder who should be in contention for the Best XI showed his quality despite his team’s struggles. Riqui Puig doesn’t have the same goal-contribution tally as Acosta or Almada as he played more withdrawn for what ended up being a poor LA Galaxy side, although his seven goals and eight assists aren’t exactly meager.
It’s his peripherals that help underline his caliber. Puig leads MLS in progressive carries per 90 by a considerable margin (15.27, a full 3.8 more than second-place Almada) as well as progressive passes (14.51, two more than João Paulo in second) and ranks fourth league-wide in American Soccer Analysis’ all-encompassing goals added metric. Although goals decide games, getting the ball closer to the net is right there in terms of vitality. Few players looked to operate in a similar echelon as the Spaniard.
While LAFC’s Denis Bouanga may have flubbed his lines when the spotlight was brightest against Inter Miami in September, forcing errant shots much to Vela’s dismay, his team’s struggle to put it all together in the regular season also dings his candidacy a bit. Still, the LAFC winger is in pole position for the league’s Golden Boot (19) — six of those strikes won matches. He won’t be the first player to spring to mind when I look back on 2023, but a lack of competition at left wing should reward his season with a spot on the Best XI.
The player who improved his team the most
Generally, this is the distinction that trips me up the most whenever the award ballot hits my inbox.
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In some sports, it seems as though an MVP is voted on despite the team around them. In American football, the award is often won by a quarterback. Is it as simple as finding the passer with the best stats or the one who helped gut out close wins with deft control of the offense? To transfer it back to our purposes, are we supposed to award it to the player who led one of the league’s best teams or the one whose team would be in far worse shape without his presence?
This is the case that Miami can cling to in defense of its Messi nomination. The scale of turnaround from Miami’s performances under Phil Neville to its soaring heights with Messi in the 10 shirt is unparalleled. If he’d played, say, 10 games before sustaining his injury, I still don’t think his case would surpass those of the players listed before and after this paragraph. Still, no player is more important — more valuable — than Messi is to Miami, on and off the field.
This is also the category that should house Cucho Hernández. The former Watford forward has acclimated very well in Columbus, helping the team storm back to the playoffs in Wilfried Nancy’s first season. His case, however, is complicated in two of the same ways that keep Ryan Gauld from the top tier of MVP candidates: a main role in a tactical system that consistently creates chances abound and incredibly talented teammates who all help improve each other’s numbers. For Hernández, that’s former running mate Lucas Zelarayán, his replacement Diego Rossi and all-around forward Christian Ramirez. For Gauld, that’s Brian White who, for what it’s worth, is the striker on my Best XI this year.
Three other players have been at the heart of their teams’ strong seasons. Goalkeeper Roman Bürki is the de facto face of St. Louis City’s “designated team” approach, backstopping the team’s best-ever debut for an expansion team. He leads MLS in goals prevented (12.03, ahead of Daniel’s 9.08) as well as thwarted crosses (60). Only one goalkeeper has ever won MLS MVP, however, and unlike Tony Meola’s triumph in 2000, there are enough high-end field players to keep Bürki off many voters’ ballots.
In San Jose, I’m not sure why Cristian Espinoza hasn’t gotten more of a spotlight for his exceptional work both this year and in past seasons. The Argentine winger is at the heart of everything the Quakes do. He leads MLS in game-winning goal contributions (nine), is tied for fifth in both G+A (25) and npG+A (21), and those 25 goal and assists contribute to 65.8% of San Jose’s entire attacking output. Perhaps the fact that his team still hasn’t clinched playoff qualification is taking some sheen off of his case. Either way, it’s a career season for a player whose talents were long wasted on some pretty middling Quakes sides in recent years.
But the player who I think should be Acosta’s chief competitor in this MVP race, and who will also factor considerably in the Best XI, is Héctor Herrera.
Counting stats does him a disservice, but they’re still pretty strong considering his role. Despite playing as a central midfielder, Herrera’s 15 assists trail only Almada. He’s in the 97th percentile for deep ball progressions, the 86th for open play expected goals, the 97th for xG chain (tallying his involvement in eventual goals) and the 98th for xG build-up (similar to xG chain, but taking away shots and assists to just look at the progressions). He’s done this without a single player on his team scoring more than 10 goals this year and only two teammates scoring at least five times. They’re the ultimate team-by-committee under head coach Ben Olsen, and Herrera may as well be their union boss.
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Making the case for Herrera requires looking past the goals and assists that usually carry a finalist’s candidacy. If you replaced Acosta with a league-average playmaker, would Cincinnati be much worse? Very likely with how well-constructed the whole roster is. Would Atlanta still be an Eastern Conference challenger without Almada? Maybe not, but we know Arthur Blank would’ve spent for another young Argentine in his place.
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Would a version of the Houston Dynamo without Herrera be a team in the West’s top-four places? Not from what I’ve seen of his involvement this season.
Depending on how healthy Messi stays in 2024, we might not have much of a contest if he replicates his Leagues Cup form across a full season. With so many great players in 2023, why not open it up a bit? In my estimation, there are at least five players with strong cases for the MVP award. While Acosta is among that quintet, treating it as “case closed” makes this whole exercise feel a bit more pointless than it should.
(Photo: Megan Briggs/Getty Images)