MLS All-Stars

There is no single ground to point to. The fixture moves from year to year, and the venue list reads like a tour of the league itself: Giants Stadium for the first game, then the Citrus Bowl, Spartan Stadium, RFK Stadium twice, Dick's Sporting Goods Park twice, Audi Field. Capacities swing from around 20,000 to well over 70,000 depending on where Major League Soccer decides to send the occasion that summer.

The team behind those venues is not a club in the ordinary sense but a squad drawn fresh each year from across the league, run out of the league's own offices in New York City. The idea dates to 1996, when the first match pitted an internal MLS East against MLS West and East won 3–2. For a few seasons the format kept shifting — East against West, then United States against the rest of the world in 1998 — before the league settled in 2002 on a single representative side wearing the All-Stars name, which beat the United States national team 3–2 in its first outing under that banner.

Since 2003 the opponent has usually come from outside MLS altogether. Chelsea have been beaten twice, in 2006 and 2012; Manchester United won both meetings, in 2010 and 2011. Real Madrid and Juventus each needed penalties to get past the All-Stars. Landon Donovan was picked for the game thirteen times and took the MVP award in 2001 and 2014, a run matched by no one else selected for the fixture. Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimović and Luis Suárez have all turned out for the opposition in recent years, and since 2021 the game has settled into a rivalry of its own against Liga MX All-Stars, contested four times.

The jersey changes every summer along with everything else — black and white in 2008, black with yellow trim in 2014. Across the fixture's history, the All-Stars have won seventeen of these one-off games.