Seattle Sounders FC added the missing piece of silverware to their trophy cabinet, beating Inter Miami CF 3-0 to win Leagues Cup 2025 in front of 69,314 fans at Lumen Field.
Miami failed to pick up a second Leagues Cup title after winning in 2023 shortly after Lionel Messi arrived, while Seattle capped off a perfect tournament run that included four victories over teams from Mexico's Liga MX.
The final tilted heavily in Seattle's favor from early on, with Osaze De Rosario, a former member of the New York City FC Academy and the son of former MLS MVP Dwayne De Rosario, scoring Seattle's opening goal in the 26th minute, heading home a cross from Alex Roldán.
Miami had chances to get back level but Tadeo Allende missed a sitter from close range and Lionel Messi was largely neutralized by a swarming Seattle defense and midfield. Alex Roldán extended Seattle's lead from the penalty spot and all but iced the result in the 84th minute, before Paul Rothrock scored a third to make it an emphatic win for the Sounders.
The losers from South Florida didn't handle the setback well, with a melee breaking out on the Lumen Field pitch after the final whistle, one that included Luis Suárez spitting on a Sounders athletic trainer and Sergio Busquets sucker-punching 20-year-old Obed Vargas.
Seattle crowned themselves, while Miami embarrassed themselves: All in a day's work for a Leagues Cup final.
Disgraceful post-match acts by Miami legends
Miami was not gracious in defeat out in the Pacific Northwest. A huge melee broke out on the Lumen Field turf after the final whistle blew, with Miami the aggressors after being humbled 3-0 and denied yet another trophy during what was supposed to be their hardware-filled Messi Era.
Luis Suárez appeared to step on the foot, then spit in the face of a Seattle athletic trainer, while Sergio Busquets delivered a sucker-punch to the jaw of babyfaced Seattle midfielder Obed Vargas, who is 17 years younger than Busquets.
My video of the Luis Suarez incident. #suarez #intermiami #leaguescup
— BJ Ca$h Money (@bjcashmoney.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 2:33 AM
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The egregious acts by Suárez and Busquets were very much caught on tape and in high-definition, so there's no way around the fact that the two legends of the sport behaved in a shocking manner.
Given that MLS Commissioner Don Garber already made the bold but necessary (based on the league's own rules) move to suspend Lionel Messi for skipping the MLS All-Star Game, you can expect there to be some swift disciplinary action coming down for Suárez and Busquets, no matter how impressive their career resumés might be.
We here at Hudson River Blue and enmeshed in the world of New York City FC saw something similar to this scene way back on Matchday 1 in Fort Lauderdale, when NYCFC played Miami to a 2-2 draw.
After that game ended, Lionel Messi confronted NYCFC assistant coach Mehdi Ballouchy and exchanged words with him while grabbing Ballouchy by the back of the neck. It was a move similar to one pulled by Luis Suárez at halftime, when he grabbed former NYCFC defender Birk Risa by the back of the neck and had words with the Norwegian. Both Messi and Suárez received fines from the MLS Disciplinary Committee for their actions.
Oliver Strand
Miami acted like toddlers upset they didn't get their way at the end of the 90 minutes of play in Seattle, and not for the first time. Their behavior at Lumen Field was a black eye that spoiled what was otherwise a comprehensive and impressive win for the Sounders, the latest triumph in a triumphant reign for the Seattle side under Head Coach Brian Schmetzer.
Seattle's milestone summer
The Sounders have now won everything there is to win for a team in Major League Soccer. Leagues Cup was their missing piece, the only available trophy they'd yet to capture, but that changed when Lionel Messi came to town for the Leagues Cup final.
This is the first trophy for the Sounders since winning Concacaf Champions League in 2022. They've won MLS Cup (twice) and the US Open Cup (four times), have a Supporters’ Shield, they've now got at least one of everything.
In winning this Leagues Cup, they got to hoist that very stout silver trophy for the first time, and they also picked up $2 million in prize money while automatically qualifying for next season’s Concacaf Champions Cup. In Leagues Cup, Schmetzer's Seattle team continued to be absolutely dominant when facing teams from Mexico, as Schmetzer's all-time record improved to 9W-6D-3L vs Liga MX opposition en route to winning Leagues Cup.
The prize money earned for the Leagues Cup win adds to a lucrative summer for Seattle, since the club earned $9 million for taking part in the Club World Cup’s group stage – a slightly controversial prize given the Sounders players protested for a bigger share of that $9 million pie than what the current collective-bargaining agreement between MLS owners and the MLS Players' Association stipulated they receive.
Seattle didn’t make it as far as Miami in the Club World Cup, but they went on the more successful post-Club World Cup run as defined by this latest trophy-clinching victory.
Post-Club World Cup journeys converge
Both Seattle and Miami were in excellent form heading into this Leagues Cup final, and each of their runs of success started with their elimination from this summer's FIFA Club World Cup. Each team had reeled off nine wins from 14 matches played post-Club World Cup, but only Seattle ended that run with a trophy.
Seattle lost all three matches they played at FIFA's redesigned and expanded summer club tournament, suffering a trio of narrow defeats to Botafogo RJ, Atlético Madrid, and Paris Saint-Germain, and all at their home ground Lumen Field. Since their group-stage elimination from the Club World Cup, Seattle's record was 9W-4D-1L with a +21 goal differential across all competitions.
Miami made it to the knockouts of the Club World Cup, the most successful of the three MLS teams in the tournament, but got knocked out by UEFA Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain in the Round of 16. Since that 4-0 loss to Messi's old squad PSG, Miami went 9W-3D-2L with a +11 goal differential across all competitions. Results were pretty similar for these teams leading into this trophy-deciding 15th match after the Club World Cup, but Seattle came out well ahead of Miami in their head-to-head.
The level of competition at the Club World Cup was a significant step up from what Seattle and Miami usually deal with here in North America, but playing those matches seemed to set both sides up for strong stretches of play immediately after they got eliminated from the CWC.
Verdict on latest version of Leagues Cup
With Seattle now crowned champions, it's a good time to take stock of how this new version of Leagues Cup actually functioned in 2025.
The new format gave us more guaranteed match-ups between MLS teams and Liga MX teams, but the new mechanism of there being one big league-specific table for each of MLS and Liga MX, then whittling the field down to four teams from each league for the knockouts, still felt harsh on the participating teams.
Mediocrity wasn't rewarded like it had been in previous iterations of Leagues Cup, so if you lost your first Leagues Cup match, you couldn't easily scrape back into contention for a spot in the knockout rounds. This is the right way to hand out a trophy, but it's not an easy way to sustain interest across the life of a tournament knowing that the wrong result on Matchday 1 could entirely torpedo a team's hopes of advancing.
Andrew Leigh
Complaints over qualification aside, at least the spacing of the matches felt a lot better in this new version of the competition. It was wise for MLS and Liga MX to shorten the period in which all league play stopped so that Leagues Cup matches could unfold – the old system, which dedicated a whole month of the calendar just to playing Leagues Cup, felt gluttonous and like there was no escape from this tournament.
Interspersing the knockout rounds with the return of MLS regular-season matches made it feel more like a proper midseason cup competition and less like a sideshow. Still, the competitive imbalance remains: A club from Mexico has yet to win Leagues Cup since the format changed to include all Liga MX sides and the vast majority of MLS clubs.
All the matches continued to be played in the United States and Canada, so while the competition improved, one of the core issues – the lack of any home-field advantage for the teams from Mexico – remains unaddressed.
It's unclear what the future will exactly hold for Leagues Cup, given the 2026 soccer calendar will be disrupted by a different month-long summer spectacle, the FIFA World Cup – and given that MLS is toying with the idea of drastically altering the format of the league calendar and maybe the whole competition, as early as the 2027 season.
The 2025 tournament was an improvement on 2023 and 2024, but Leagues Cup still could use further refinement if it's going to stick around and develop into a lasting part of the North American soccer landscape.
Teams from MLS continue to monopolize the trophy, and teams from MLS certainly care about winning that trophy – otherwise we likely wouldn't have seen very-public meltdowns from Luis Suárez and Sergio Busquets.
Here's to hoping there's a future where Leagues Cup takes its show south of the border for at least some of the tournament, and that we don't see a repeat of Miami's spitting-and-punching antics after the next Leagues Cup champion gets crowned.
