To me, this one felt preordained.
Inter Miami CF and Vancouver Whitecaps FC roll into MLS Cup 2025 presented by Audi on Saturday carrying more star power than any final this league has ever staged, as they’ve both grown into the juggernauts their résumés promise (2:30 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV; FOX, FOX Deportes; TSN, RDS).
For the ‘Caps, it happened from basically their first kick of the season, and in spite of one injury after another. For Miami, it took longer, but the moment has arrived over the past two months.
So these are obviously not Cinderella stories; they’re apex predators (yes, ‘Caps fans; I know it might feel weird, but that’s what your team is) whose late-season form virtually promised us this culmination. The questions now: Who executes at the highest level? Whose strengths bend the game? And who walks away with the Cup?
What we’ve seen from Miami
Javier Mascherano’s Miami have spent the last third of the season playing their most coherent, assertive soccer – a structured, possession-heavy machine fueled by Lionel Messi’s singular brilliance and a supporting cast that now fully understands how to orbit him.
As mentioned above, it took a while to get to this point. Miami have shuffled players both young and old into more and less prominent roles as the season has gone along, and as the roster has evolved, Messi’s role has evolved with it. The latest iteration brought us back to the Peak Messi years of the early 2010s: He’s back playing as a false 9 in a 4-3-3, dropping in to get on the ball as a playmaker or drifting off the backline to disorganize the opposing center backs with his gravity as he sees fit. At the same time, he’s now got two willing, direct runners in the channels in Mateo Silvetti (2g/3a in ~300 minutes in the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs) and Tadeo Allende (8g/2a in ~430 minutes in the playoffs) to attack the spaces he opens up.
Here’s how that looked via the network passing graphic from their emphatic 5-1 win over New York City FC in the Eastern Conference Final:
Network passing graphs can sometimes lie, but you’d be right to make certain inferences from this one. For example, you could read this as the fullbacks coming up to form triangles (Jordi Alba on the left with Baltasar Rodríguez and Sergio Busquets; Marcelo Weigandt on the right with Allende and Rodrigo De Paul) in possession in order to suck the opposing defense towards the ball and open up more space for Messi, and in my opinion that would be the correct interpretation.
The lie, however, would be Messi’s positioning. It’s not that he’s getting more touches in the middle now. It’s that the location on the graphic is the average location of his touches, and right now, because of Miami’s structure, he’s getting an almost equal amount of touches in both the right and left channels, and is actually getting fewer in the central channel than he did earlier this year when playing either as a pure No. 10 or an inverted right winger.
Mascherano deserves a ton of credit for this, obviously. Not only has it unleashed Messi – he’s got 6g/7a in five playoff games – but keeping the game largely confined to one channel or another has provided an even more massive defensive benefit for a Miami team that spent so much of the season being unbalanced in rest defense and gappy as they tried to recover.
Not to quote a really bad movie, but it’s kind of an “aim small, miss small” thing. Miami are going to get on the ball a lot no matter the system they play. Confining what they do to a more limited spot on the field makes it easier to either win the ball back immediately or to get pressure on the opposition if they win the ball back immediately, and thus spend less time trying to run down breakaways.
And so they’ve conceded just four times in five playoff games, while scoring 17. Suffice it to say the tactical shift – and, I should mention, the personnel shift; Mascherano made one of the gutsiest calls in MLS history by benching Luis Suárez for Silvetti – has paid off.
What we’ve seen from Vancouver
I had no idea who Jesper Sørensen was at this time last year. Now I am willing to go to war for that man, who has turned Vancouver into a ruthlessly balanced, aesthetically beautiful unit, no matter who’s been on the field.
No Ryan Gauld for seven months? That’s fine, we can work around it. Lost our top four or five center backs? So it goes. Sliding in a rookie left back for some of the biggest games in club history? That’s no problem.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this season Sørensen's put together is the single most impressive coaching job in MLS history. It’s not just that he compensated for the loss of Gauld or Sam Adekugbe or Ranko Veselinović; it’s that he compensated for all three, while developing young players like Tate Johnson and Rayan Elloumi and turning guys like Sebastian Berhalter, Tristan Blackmon and Brian White into legitimate national teamers AND at the same time guiding the ‘Caps to an appearance in the Concacaf Champions Cup final – absolutely crushing a certain pink-clad team along the way – as well as their best regular-season record ever, and their fourth-straight Canadian Championship title.
He did all this while putting together a new game model, one that pairs tactical discipline with an almost Crew-like level of improvisation within the structure he’s built. For the first part of the year, that came primarily out of a 4-3-3. But then in the summer window, they did a very un-'Caps-like thing in adding a big-name, big-money legend: German superstar Thomas Müller.
And look, this wasn’t a slam-dunk. We have seen great players like Mūller come to MLS and crash out in the past, and this one felt especially fraught because 1) Vancouver had been so good all year without a star centerpiece, and 2) bringing in Mūller necessitated a formation switch to a 4-2-3-1. I thought it would work, but there was no guarantee.
Well, the Caps are 9W-1L-5D with a +24 goal differential across all competitions since Müller arrived. Their only loss came when an early red card reduced them to 10 men for 80 minutes. They are now a better version of the team that crushed Miami (5-1 on aggregate) in the CCC back in the spring.
Mūller is the biggest part of that, but hasn’t been “the centerpiece” in a “let’s build the team around him" way. He’s just been Thomas Mūller – a force magnifier who simply understands better than anyone exactly how he can fit into any scheme and make everyone around him better. What worked in Bavaria works just as well in British Columbia.
In short, the two best teams in the league are meeting in MLS Cup.
What will decide the match?
I think the ‘Caps will come upfield with the ball because that’s what they’re best at, and they’re fearless in doing so. I think they will cause Miami real problems with that – they’ll make Busquets chase a ton, and probably flatten out that midfield three, causing a dislocation between them and the frontline unless the Herons’ fullbacks start taking untenable risks.
At the same time, that could/will end up drawing Messi deeper and deeper, making Miami’s own 4-3-3 almost function more like a diamond with Messi as a more old fashioned Argentine No. 10. That has defensive knock-ons; I could see him, instead of leading the press, sitting on Andrés Cubas (still unbeaten against Messi in his career, and yes, that includes a ton of significant games!) in order to complicate Vancouver’s build-outs.
This is a double-edged sword for Vancouver, though, because if you come upfield like that against Miami, you're conceding space for Allende and Silvetti to run into. And any time that’s happened this postseason, the Herons have scored. Again and again and again.
But that battle for pitch control in midfield – can one team develop tempo and incisiveness while pulling the other apart juuuuust a little bit more than they’re used to? – feels to me like the spot where this one will be won.
That or set pieces, I guess.
Who will lift MLS Cup?
Miami.
I picked them at the beginning of the year, and I picked them at the beginning of the playoffs, and given how good they’ve been, I can’t imagine this team going trophy-less this season.
No shade on the ‘Caps – this has been one of my five (or so) favorite teams in MLS history. They’d be more worthy winners if they pull this one off.
But this isn’t the same version of Miami that they punked back in the spring. They’re much, much better on both sides of the ball than folks have realized, and they’re at home, and they’ve got Messi. That’s good enough for me.
