MLS All-Star voting results 2026: how the leaders are announced and read
Major League Soccer announced the 2026 First XI on June 5, and a May 17 update listed the top five vote-getters in each position group alphabetically. Those two releases are the MLS All-Star voting results for 2026: a combined fan, player and media ballot, with each group carrying one third of the combined vote. The league names the player with the most fan votes but publishes no count and no percentage.
Compiled by BuyContestVotesNow editorial desk / Checked
How the 2026 results were announced
Major League Soccer closed the fan ballot and published the outcome in stages. The league announced the First XI players named to the 2026 MLS All-Star Game presented by Chime in a roster release dated June 5, 2026. A later roster release describes the first 11 players as announced on June 4, so the two official texts disagree on the day by one. Read both as parts of a single announcement window in early June rather than as two separate results, and take the roster itself, not the paperwork date, as the substance.
The selections carry a name of their own: the First XI. MLS describes them as the standout performers from the first half of the regular season, chosen through a combined vote of fans, players and media members. That framing matters for anyone reading the MLS All-Star voting results, because the fan ballot never produces a standalone winner list. The fan share surfaces only inside the combined eleven, and the release treats the XI as one award, not as six separate races with separate champions.
One key detail the announcement does give: Chicago Fire FC's Mbokazi drew the most fan votes of any player and became the second South African player selected to an MLS All-Star roster in league history. Even there the league stops short of a figure. The honour is named; the number behind it is not.
Who leads the way in the May update
Before the close, MLS published a mid-race update and answered its own headline question. The update named the top five vote-getters per position group as of May 17, and it grouped them by position: goalkeepers, center backs, right backs, defensive midfield, attacking midfield, and forwards or wingers. Six groups, five names each, one snapshot.
Dates, deadlines and the voting window
The update carries its own date, May 17, and the ballot carried its own close. Per the update, ballots remained open through 11:59 pm PT on May 21. Everything after that belongs to the league: the roster build, the First XI release in early June, and the rest of the All-Star schedule around the game itself. The snapshot and the close sit four days apart, so the published standings freeze before the race did.
For the leaders question, today matters in one direction only. There is no live count to check on a given day; MLS publishes snapshots when it chooses to, and the May 17 update was one of them. Anyone checking MLS All-Star voting results today finds a closed record, not a running board. If a further snapshot appears around a future ballot, it will appear where the earlier one did, on the league's own channels.
That makes the public race easy to state and hard to track mid-flight. The window ran into May 21, and the published standings exist only at the points MLS chose to publish them.
What the published results do not include
The gap is structural, and it is worth naming plainly. The First XI announcement identifies the player with the most fan votes but gives no vote count and no percentage for him or anyone else. The May update lists five names per position group in alphabetical order by last name, explicitly not by vote total. So no ranking inside the top five is on the record, and no margin between names is on the record either.
Anyone reading the MLS All-Star voting results should therefore work with three absences: no counts, no percentages, no order inside the published five. An unofficial tally found in a fan thread cannot be checked against anything the league has said, because the league has said nothing numeric at all.
That also settles what a leader means here. A leader is a name MLS chose to publish at a date it chose. The word does not imply a measured gap over the four names printed beside it.
Rules, disqualification and what the organiser checks
A fan ballot is only as clean as its rules, and the organiser holds them. MLS runs the ballot on its own platform, sets the eligibility and submission rules for each edition, and can discount entries that break those published rules. A submission a review flags as automated does not join the tally; a pattern that looks manufactured can be removed before the count is settled. That is the normal machinery of an organised fan vote, and it is why the announced XI carries weight.
That cuts both ways for a reader scanning the MLS All-Star voting results. The published leaders have passed whatever checks the organiser applies, and the announced First XI is the league's own statement, not a scraped tally from a third party. Unofficial numbers quoted in fan spaces have no such standing.
The honest position on anything outside the rules is short. A submission that breaks the ballot rules does not count, whatever the method behind it, and no disqualified entry helps a player's standing on any version of this ballot.
Reading the standings without overreading them
Four habits cover most of the misreadings. Beyond them, the MLS All-Star voting results hold only what the league chose to print: two dates, six position groups, thirty names, and one unnamed distinction at the top of the fan count. Read the releases directly, keep the alphabetical rule in mind, and treat everything else as commentary.
- Alphabetical is not rank: the five names in each group sit in last-name order, so the first name listed is not the front-runner.
- A snapshot is not a trend: May 17 says nothing about the final four days before the May 21 close.
- The First XI is not the fan ballot alone: players and media carried two-thirds of the combined vote.
- The named fan-vote leader is not a number: MLS named Mbokazi without a count or a percentage.
| Position group | Top five as of May 17 |
|---|---|
| Goalkeepers | Hugo Lloris (LAFC), Brian Schwake (Nashville SC), Brad Stuver (Austin FC), Andrew Thomas (Seattle Sounders FC), Matt Turner (New England Revolution) |
| Center backs | Tristan Blackmon, Mathías Laborda (Vancouver Whitecaps FC), Mbekezeli Mbokazi (Chicago Fire FC), Daniel Munie (San Jose Earthquakes), Jackson Ragen (Seattle Sounders FC) |
| Right backs | Ender Echenique (FC Cincinnati), Andy Najar (Nashville SC), Édier Ocampo (Vancouver Whitecaps FC), Alex Roldan (Seattle Sounders FC), DeAndre Yedlin (Real Salt Lake) |
| Defensive midfield | Sebastian Berhalter, Andrés Cubas (Vancouver Whitecaps FC), Rodrigo De Paul (Inter Miami CF), Adri Mehmeti (Red Bull New York), Cristian Roldan (Seattle Sounders FC) |
| Attacking midfield | Evander (FC Cincinnati), Carles Gil (New England Revolution), Diego Luna (Real Salt Lake), Hany Mukhtar (Nashville SC), Niko Tsakiris (San Jose Earthquakes) |
| Forwards and wingers | Denis Bouanga, Son Heung-Min (LAFC), Hugo Cuypers (Chicago Fire FC), Lionel Messi (Inter Miami CF), Petar Musa (FC Dallas) |
Do this in order
-
Find the league release
MLS publishes the First XI announcement and any mid-vote update on its own channels. Start there; a roster release is the authoritative form of the result.
-
Check the date on the list
Each update carries its snapshot date. The May 17 update lists the top five per position group as of that day, four days before the ballot closed on May 21.
-
Read the order for what it is
The names run alphabetically by last name, not by standing. Position within the published five tells you nothing about who was ahead of whom.
-
Look for the announcement, not a count
The result arrives as a roster release in early June naming the First XI. No vote count and no percentage accompanies it, so ignore any figure attached to the same names.
Fast answers
How is Burki not among the top five goalkeepers in the update?
Burki is not on the list because the update never named him. Its goalkeeper group as of May 17 ran Hugo Lloris, Brian Schwake, Brad Stuver, Andrew Thomas and Matt Turner, and that list sits in alphabetical order by last name rather than as a ranking. The release gives no vote counts, so there is no published gap between those five names and any goalkeeper outside the group. Absence from an alphabetical top-five snapshot says little about a player's real standing in the race.
Why the fuck is Burki not in the race GK?
The race's only published form is alphabetical, and Burki did not make the printed five. The May 17 update listed Lloris, Schwake, Stuver, Thomas and Turner among goalkeepers, with no counts and no ranking attached. The ballot itself closed on May 21, and the First XI announcement named its selections without figures. So the record neither confirms nor denies where any unnamed goalkeeper finished; the omission is a fact of the published list, not a verdict.
Yedlin seems surprising to me, hasn't he been injured?
The update lists DeAndre Yedlin of Real Salt Lake among the top five right backs as of May 17, alongside Echenique, Najar, Ocampo and Alex Roldan. It says nothing about injuries, form or minutes, and the alphabetical order carries no information about standing. Whatever a reader knows about a player's season comes from match coverage, not from this ballot record; the release itself offers names and clubs only.
With the second most goals, the third most assists, and ranking second for key passes, why does he not get a spot?
The ballot record cannot answer that, because it publishes no vote totals to argue against. The May update lists names only, alphabetically, and the First XI release names the eleven selections without counts or percentages. A stat line, however strong, sits outside the record MLS has published; no official figure shows how close any player came. Whether a player deserved a spot on the numbers is a judgement the published form of the ballot can neither confirm nor refute.
2026 MLS All-Star voting update: Who leads the way?
The May 17 update named the top five vote-getters in each position group, alphabetically by last name. Goalkeepers: Lloris, Schwake, Stuver, Thomas and Turner. Center backs: Blackmon, Laborda, Mbokazi, Munie and Ragen. Right backs: Echenique, Najar, Ocampo, Alex Roldan and Yedlin. Defensive midfield: Berhalter, Cubas, De Paul, Mehmeti and Cristian Roldan. Attacking midfield: Evander, Gil, Luna, Mukhtar and Tsakiris. Forwards and wingers: Bouanga, Cuypers, Son, Messi and Musa. The order is alphabetical, not a ranking of the MLS All-Star voting results.
Does MLS publish vote counts or percentages for the All-Star ballot?
No. The First XI announcement identifies the player with the most fan votes but gives no count and no percentage, and the May update orders its names alphabetically rather than by total. That is the shape of every published figure: names, clubs, dates. Where other ballots publish tallies, the league has chosen not to for this one, so any number quoted elsewhere is unofficial.
References
- mlssoccer.com. mlssoccer.com/news/mls-announces-first-xi-players-named-to-the-2026-mls-all-star-game-presented-by-chime-roster.
- mlssoccer.com. mlssoccer.com/news/mls-announces-first-xi-players-named-to-the-2026-mls-all-star-game-presented-by-chime-roster.
- mlssoccer.com. mlssoccer.com/news/voting-begins-today-for-2026-mls-all-star-game-presented-by-chime.
- mlssoccer.com. mlssoccer.com/allstar/2026/news/mls-all-star-2026-voting-update-who-leads-the-way-charlotte.
- mlssoccer.com. mlssoccer.com/news/mls-announces-first-xi-players-named-to-the-2026-mls-all-star-game-presented-by-chime-roster.
No vote count and no percentage is published for the First XI, and none appears here. The May update orders its five names alphabetically, not by rank, so no inside-the-five standings exist. No injury or form information appears in the ballot record. A result is not final until MLS publishes it in its own release. Never treat an unofficial tally found in fan spaces as the official MLS All-Star voting result; the organiser's own releases are the whole record.
Each organiser's own terms decide which votes are valid, and an organiser can void votes or disqualify an entry. ITV's Love Island terms limit each registered mobile number to one vote per voting event and rule out any method the terms do not state. America's Got Talent asks voters to register and accept its official voting rules, with a cap of ten votes per act, per voting method, per voting window. The American Music Awards decided each winner by the total of valid votes in the category.
Organisers write an ordinary voter down in numbers. The American Music Awards allowed up to 30 votes per award per day on each voting platform, the NASCAR All-Star Race fan vote allowed five a day per unique email address, and the iHeartRadio Music Awards allowed 50 a day per category. A crowd of separate voters stays inside limits like these and arrives day by day, with busier days when an organiser opens a boost. This describes how organisers count; it is not a way around a check.
We give no legal advice and cite no statute: the terms that bind a fan vote are the organiser's own, and they fix who may vote. Dancing with the Stars online voters must be at least 18 and in the United States, its territories or Canada; Love Island USA voting is open to US residents aged 18 or older, or with parental permission. We refuse member-only ballots such as the ACM Awards, categories an organiser decides itself, as MTV did with Best Video, and any vote for public office.
supportabc.zendesk.com peacocktv.com acmcountry.com press.mtvema.com
The part of a request that is not delivered before the organiser's voting closes is refunded. A result, a disqualification and a voided vote are never refunded, because the organiser decides all three. Nor is a vote's worth inside the format covered: the MLB All-Star ballot did not carry Phase 1 totals into Phase 2, and at The Game Awards fan voting is one tenth of the vote that decides winners.