For the first time in club history, Charlotte FC have players on the MLS All-Star roster and all three will pull on the jersey in front of their own fans when the league’s best face Liga MX at Bank of America Stadium.
There are milestones a young club ticks off quietly, and there are ones that announce it has arrived. This is the latter. Major League Soccer confirmed on Wednesday that Charlotte FC midfielders Pep Biel and Ashley Westwood have been named to the 2026 MLS All-Star roster, joining teammate Tim Ream to give the Crown three representatives at the midseason showcase. It is the first time in the club’s history that Charlotte have had a single player selected and they have managed three at once, in the very year they host the game.
Biel and Westwood were named as Coach’s Selections, chosen by MLS All-Star head coach Dean Smith, who, fittingly, will lead the MLS side himself. Ream, the club’s defender and United States captain, had already been voted in earlier in the process. The MLS All-Stars will face a team of Liga MX All-Stars on Wednesday, July 29, with kickoff set for 8 p.m. ET at Bank of America Stadium, the first time the Queen City has ever staged the event.
Pep Biel
If any Charlotte player has earned this, it’s Biel. The Spanish playmaker has been the engine of the Crown’s attack, and the numbers back it up: his seven goals lead the team and his 13 goal contributions this season place him inside the top 20 league-wide. It’s the continuation of a run of form that goes back to his standout 2025 campaign, when he racked up 21 goal contributions (10 goals and 11 assists) and drew genuine MVP conversation.
Charlotte clearly saw it coming. Having first arrived on loan from Olympiacos in August 2024, Biel did enough to earn a permanent move in January 2026, signing a Designated Player contract that runs through 2027 with a club option for 2028. A veteran of FC Copenhagen, where he once posted 60 goal contributions and was named the club’s player of the season, Biel brings European pedigree and a creator’s instinct by his own admission, he takes more joy from an assist than a goal. For a player who has quietly made everyone around him better, an All-Star nod is overdue recognition.
Ashley Westwood
Where Biel supplies the flash, Westwood supplies the foundation. The Crown captain has been the metronome in Charlotte’s midfield, and his selection rewards the kind of work that rarely makes highlight reels but shows up everywhere else. Westwood is completing 87 percent of his passes this season, a career high in MLS, as the stabilizing presence that lets the players ahead of him take risks.
He has chipped in going forward, too: his five assists through 13 matches sit just one shy of the career-best six he managed in 2024. For a player whose value is measured as much in positioning, tempo and leadership as in raw output, being chosen by his own manager for the All-Star Game is a nod to the full picture.
Ream’s 15-Year Bookend
The third Charlotte name carries its own remarkable story. Ream’s selection comes a full 15 years after his first All-Star appearance, back in 2011 with the New York Red Bulls – a gap now tied with Tim Howard for the longest between a player’s first and second All-Star selections in league history. The USMNT captain, one of the standout veterans of this season, completes a Charlotte trio spanning defense and midfield, experience and creativity.