Six players have won multiple MLS Golden Boot awards including Lionel Messi
Lionel Messi won the 2026 MLS Golden Boot for Inter Miami, becoming the first player in Major League Soccer history to win the award in consecutive seasons after also claiming it in 2025. The 39-year-old’s back-to-back Golden Boots make him one of six players to win the MLS top-scorer award more than once.
Since joining Inter Miami in July 2023, Messi has made 124 appearances for the club, scoring 107 goals and registering 60 assists. He has been named MLS MVP twice, in consecutive seasons, and has won five titles with Inter Miami: the 2023 Leagues Cup, the 2024 MLS Supporters’ Shield, the 2025 MLS Eastern Conference Title, the 2025 MLS Cup and the 2026 Campeones Cup. Six players in total — Lionel Messi, Predrag Radosavljević (Preki), Taylor Twellman, Jeff Cunningham, Chris Wondolowski and Bradley Wright-Phillips — have won multiple MLS Golden Boot awards.
Predrag Radosavljević, known as Preki, joined the Kansas City Wizards during MLS’s formation in 1996 and scored 50 goals in a five-year spell with the club. He won the 1997 MLS Golden Boot (then the MLS Scoring Champion Award) with 12 goals and 17 assists, and replicated those same figures in 2003 to claim a second top-scorer award. Preki is the first player to have won both the MLS MVP Award and the MLS Golden Boot award twice; Lionel Messi is the only other player to match that double achievement.
Taylor Twellman, a New England Revolution forward and 30-time USMNT international, became the youngest player to score 100 MLS goals at age 29. Twellman won the MLS Scoring Champion award in 2002 after scoring 23 goals and registering six assists, and after the league changed the rules to focus only on goals scored with ties broken by assists, he won the 2005 MLS Golden Boot with 17 goals in 25 games.
Jeff Cunningham, born in Jamaica and a USMNT international, won the Golden Boot in 2006 by scoring 16 goals in 31 matches for Real Salt Lake. After a difficult spell with Toronto FC, he moved to FC Dallas and scored 17 goals in 28 matches in 2009 to secure his second MLS Golden Boot.
Chris Wondolowski, the MLS all-time top scorer with 171 goals, spent 14 seasons primarily with the San Jose Earthquakes. His breakthrough came in 2010 when he scored 18 goals in 28 matches to win the Golden Boot; he followed that with a 2012 campaign of 27 goals in 32 matches to win the award a second time and become the Quakes’ all-time leading goalscorer.
Bradley Wright-Phillips won his first MLS Golden Boot in his first full season in the league, scoring 27 goals in 32 matches for the New York Red Bulls to lift the 2014 award. He added a second Golden Boot in 2016 by scoring 24 goals in 34 matches, finishing ahead of David Villa for the top-scorer prize that season.
Messi recorded 29 goals and 16 assists in 28 MLS matches in 2025 and followed that with 26 goals and 14 assists in 31 MLS matches in 2026, and he finished fifth in the 2026 Ballon d’Or rankings. Fans can only wonder if a hat-trick of Golden Boot awards will come in 2027.