The 2025 MLS All-Star Game is Wednesday, July 23 in Austin, Texas, with the best in MLS taking on the Liga MX All-Stars at Q2 Stadium.
It’s the fourth time in five years that MLS has chosen an All-Star team from Mexico’s top flight as its All-Star Game opponent, and it’s not hard to see why. There is a longstanding soccer rivalry between the countries at the national team level, and that extends to club play. MLS vs. Liga MX matches have often been fiery and dramatic, and there’s no more reliable method for each league to test itself than by facing its next-door neighbor.
The links between the two leagues go deeper than that, though, with MLS and Liga MX openly discussing ideas on how the two sides could go closer. The Leagues Cup — a competition invented by MLS and Liga MX involving 18 teams from both — kicks off in six days, and despite gripes on both side of the Rio Grande, it is the most concrete evidence that both sides want to develop this partnership further.
Ahead of the 2025 MLS All-Star Game, here’s what to know about the ties between MLS and Liga MX:
MLS, Liga MX driven together by geography
Wednesday’s All-Star Game is far from the first time MLS and Liga MX have collaborated. Over the last decade, the two biggest leagues in Concacaf (the governing body for soccer in North and Central America and the Caribbean), have actively sought opportunities to work together, whether on or off the field.
There is a long-standing rivalry between U.S. and Mexican soccer dating back to the U.S. men’s national team emerging as a threat to El Tri‘s decades as the region’s lone hegemon in the 1990s. While clashes between MLS and Liga MX clubs in the Concacaf Champions Cup, the now-defunct Superliga, and the Leagues Cup have often come with acrimony, the two leagues have found plenty of common cause.
Generally speaking, each of FIFA’s six confederations has its own competition, with invitees to continental club championships very uncommon. MLS and Liga MX are two of the only leagues to enjoy such treatment, with Mexico most notably granted entries into South America’s Copa Libertadores from 1998-2016. MLS and Liga MX teams were also granted sporadic places in the Copa Sudamericana — CONMEBOL’s second-tier international tournament — in the early 2000s, and in the Copa Merconorte (a forerunner to the Copa Sudamericana) as well.
However, MLS’s last participation in CONMEBOL play came in 2007, and with a clogged schedule and immense travel required, there is no reason to expect that to change. The world’s most prominent club competition, the UEFA Champions League, has at no point shown an inclination towards inviting participants to fly across the Atlantic, with the distances involved making such a move a non-starter.
The realities of economics and population size hampering the attempts of other Concacaf leagues to provide serious competition. This didn’t used to be the case, but in recent years a gap has become clear: in the last four years only four teams from outside MLS and Liga MX have reached the Concacaf Champions Cup quarterfinals, none of whom moved on to the semifinals. In 2025, MLS and Liga MX teams won 11 of 12 total meetings with teams from other leagues.
That leaves MLS and Liga MX in a difficult spot in terms of closing down the financial gaps with the giants of European and South American soccer. While both leagues are seen as offering superior top-to-bottom strength as compared to most leagues worldwide, Europe’s strongest divisions in particular are still a long way off. As long as that’s the case, there is a ceiling in terms of audience and access to sponsors that will hold both MLS and Liga MX back.
Without an on-field competition that could give the kind of economic lift needed to gain ground on Europe’s most powerful leagues — all of which are easily streamed by viewers in the U.S. and Mexico — gaining further ground has proven very difficult.
MLS, Liga MX have long sought closer ties
With circumstances driving the two rival leagues together, both MLS and Liga MX have shown an interest in working together, even when that has required outside-the-box thinking. An All-Star Game is an easy win; it’s an exhibition that requires little in terms of FIFA or Concacaf approval.
It’s on other fronts where things have gotten a bit more interesting. Essentially, MLS looks with envy on Liga MX’s long-standing cultural heft, with the Mexican top flight drawing TV ratings comparable to the Premier League. For MLS, getting the Liga MX audience to regularly watch and attend the top league in the U.S. and Canada is an obvious move.
Liga MX sides, meanwhile, see the financial stability and business practices in MLS as a model to follow. It’s not so much for giants like Club América, Tigres, or Chivas Guadalajara, but rather to lift the league’s floor. Liga MX teams have long been willing to spend big, but there have also been more examples of teams folding, moving, or running into other issues that MLS has largely avoided over the last 20 years.
MLS and Liga MX have both been comfortable enough over the idea of working together that chatter over a possible merger has bubbled up from time to time. While concrete steps haven’t been taken, the two leagues have looked at various ways to work together.
The Leagues Cup — a summer tournament featuring every Liga MX club and a varying number of MLS sides — is the most concrete current example, with the two organizations using that competition to introduce Lionel Messi as an Inter Miami player in 2023.
The tournament has drawn some criticism in both nations, with U.S.-based fans voicing a preference for the domestic U.S. Open Cup after MLS attempted to unilaterally withdraw from that event in part to open space on the calendar. Liga MX fans, meanwhile, have been frustrated that the tournament is played in the U.S. only. Last year, Domè Torrent (who currently coaches Monterrey, but was in charge with Atlético San Luis at the time) called Leagues Cup ‘a joke of a competition’ over the travel and weather conditions Liga MX teams had to endure.
Nevertheless, the Leagues Cup has garnered plenty of media and fan attention in both nations, with the intensity and caliber of play impossible to completely dismiss. MLS and Liga MX executives remain bullish over the competition, even as it was modified in 2025 to only include 18 MLS teams.
‘I think we need more MLS versus Liga MX matches,’ said Garber in December. ‘We’re looking at modifications that will, I think, make it more focused on what it is that we’re trying to achieve, which is this great rivalry between our two leagues.’
In other words, the leagues are very likely going to keep seeking ways to increase their connections.
MLS All-Star Game history vs. Liga MX
Here is a list of times the MLS All-Star Game has paired a selection of Major League Soccer stars against a team of Liga MX All-Stars.
2021: MLS 1, Liga MX 1 (MLS wins 3-2 on penalty kicks)
2022: MLS 2, Liga MX 1
2024: Liga MX 4, MLS 1
MLS All-Star Game: Where have opponents come from?
Once Wednesday’s game kicks off, MLS will have played an All-Star Game in 29 of its 30 seasons, only skipping 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, while the format for the game has largely been a straightforward 90-minute game with penalty kicks to break ties, the league has rotated between numerous options in terms of finding two teams to put on the field.
Here is where MLS All-Star Game opponents have come from over the years:
Premier League: 10 times (2005-06, 2008-12, 2015-16, 2023)
Intra-MLS: 7 (1996-2001, 2004)
Liga MX All-Stars: 4 (2021-22, 2024-25)
Serie A: 2 (2013 vs. AS Roma, 2018 vs. Juventus)
La Liga: 2 (2017 vs. Real Madrid, 2019 vs. Atlético Madrid)
USMNT: 1 (2002)
Liga MX club: 1 (2003 vs. Chivas Guadalajara)
Scottish Premiership: 1 (2007 vs. Celtic FC)
Bundesliga: 1 (2014 vs. Bayern Munich)
MLS All-Star Game 2025: Time, TV, streaming, how to watch
The 2025 MLS All-Star Game is set for Wednesday, July 23, with kickoff scheduled for 9 p.m. ET.
Date: Wednesday, July 23
Time: 9 p.m. ET
Location: Q2 Stadium (Austin, Texas)
TV channel: None
Streaming: Apple TV (free), Prime Video, Comcast Xfinity, DirecTV
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