Inside five days in July, Lionel Messi collected both ends of ESPN's rating scale. On 15 July 2026 he crossed for the 92nd-minute goal that beat England in the World Cup semi-final and was marked 9/10.1 On 19 July, in a final Spain won 1-0, he had one touch in the first fifteen minutes and was marked 3/10.2
He was 39 in both matches, and the 16 rankings below all include him. What they disagree about is which of those two players they are measuring.
Sixteen lists, two Messis: the one whose records closed at Barcelona in 2021, and the one still adding to them in Florida.
Greatest of all time: Messi against Pelé
The broadest question in football throws every era and every position into one ranking, and Messi's entry to it is built partly on the man beside him in the frame.
Pelé scored 643 goals for Santos, a total at a single club that stood for half a century. Messi passed it at Barcelona and finished on 672.3
Gerd Müller held the record for goals in a calendar year from 1972 until Messi scored 91 of them in 2012.3
Pelé's reply is three World Cups, won in 1958, 1962 and 1970. Messi has one, from 2022, plus the final he lost this summer.
Diego Maradona is the objection that comes up more often, and it rests on one tournament: 1986, a modest Argentina squad, seven matches, the trophy. Johan Cruyff never won a World Cup at all and is still picked in the top handful of every version of this question.
Maradona's supporters need one tournament to make their case. Messi's need twenty years of them.
Barcelona: two decades of home turf
Barcelona's record book is the shortest explanation of why Messi is on this list. He played 778 official matches for the club, laid on 305 assists and won 35 trophies there, ten of them La Liga titles, and holds every one of those marks outright.3
His first league appearance for Barcelona came in October 2004, and seventeen seasons later he was still the first name on the team sheet.3
Johan Cruyff is the standing objection, and the frame below carries him: five seasons as a Barcelona player, then the coach of the side that won the club's first European Cup.
Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Ronaldinho are candidates here too, and the Barcelona teams Messi's records came from were also theirs.
Argentina and the Maradona question
Argentina's own list is the one Messi has never settled with numbers, because the name in front of him belongs to a single tournament.
Maradona's 1986 is the whole case for him. He captained an unremarkable squad to the title and scored twice against England in the quarter-final, once with his hand and once through half the team.
Messi's case is accumulation. Across six World Cups he created 99 chances for Argentina against Maradona's 71, the second-highest total in sixty years of records.4
Alfredo Di Stéfano qualifies for this one and left for Spain before he ever played a World Cup. Mario Kempes won the 1978 tournament at home. Neither is what makes the question hard.
Ballon d'Or winners only
This list keeps only the players France Football has crowned since 2000, which makes it the narrowest field Messi appears in anywhere on the page.
His eight awards run from 2009 to 2023, four of them in consecutive years between 2009 and 2012.3
Luka Modrić has one. So do Kaká, Ronaldinho, Fabio Cannavaro and Karim Benzema, and one is the normal number for a career with a single peak in it.
La Liga's all-time greats
La Liga history is the section where Messi's case is a certificate rather than a claim. Guinness World Records credits him with 474 goals in the Spanish top division between May 2005 and May 2021, at 0.91 a game, and with finishing as the league's leading scorer in eight separate seasons.5
Sergio Ramos shows up in the frame below, a reminder that defenders qualify here as well.
Telmo Zarra and Alfredo Di Stéfano scored in a league with fewer clubs and fewer matches in it, which is the counter Messi's totals cannot answer.
The Champions League, Ronaldo's competition
Europe is the one competition on this page where Messi is not the leading name — Cristiano Ronaldo, in the frame below, holds its all-time scoring record, and Messi is behind him on it.
What Messi has here is 120 Champions League goals for Barcelona, a club record, and four European Cups: 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2015.3 Two of those finals were against Manchester United.
Paolo Maldini, Zinedine Zidane, Raúl and Didier Drogba are in this field too, and Messi's last European Cup came six years before he left Barcelona. That gap is the part of his record the ranking exposes.
Copa América: 2021, then 2024
South America's championship is where Messi stopped losing finals for Argentina, which is why it earns a place among the 16.
In 2021 he was chosen the tournament's best player, shared the scoring lead on four goals and led it outright with five assists, and Ángel Di María's 22nd-minute chip at the Maracanã ended twenty-eight years without a major trophy for Argentina.6
The 2024 title arrived without him on the pitch. Messi went off in the 65th minute, visibly in pain, and Lautaro Martínez scored in the 112th to give Argentina a record sixteenth Copa América.7
Neymar takes the other half of the frame. Two titles in four years is Messi's whole case here, and he watched the second one arrive from the bench.
28 World Cup giants at once
Twenty-eight names from the tournament's whole history, and Messi's entry changed twice during the 2026 edition.
A hat-trick against Algeria in Argentina's opening match took him level with Miroslav Klose's record of 16 World Cup goals. Two more against Austria on 23 June put him clear of it.8
He finished on 21. Kylian Mbappé then took two off England in the third-place match to finish on 22, so the record left Messi's hands before the tournament did.9
Pelé, Maradona and Zinedine Zidane are ranked here as well, and none of them played six World Cups to build a total. That is the objection: Messi's number is the sum of a very long career.
Best of the 2026 World Cup
The newest ranking here is five weeks old, and Messi is on it for a tournament that ended badly.
He scored or set up a goal in all seven of Argentina's matches, finishing with eight goals and four assists.4 Argentina reached a second consecutive final, four years after winning in 2022.
His cross in the 92nd minute of the semi-final found Lautaro Martínez's head and beat England 2-1, and ESPN called him Argentina's brightest spark that night.1
The final ran the other way. Spain won 1-0 at MetLife Stadium through Ferran Torres in the 106th minute, and Emiliano Martínez made 11 saves behind a team that hardly attacked.2
Lamine Yamal was on the side that won it, and this ranking is full of the Spain players who beat Argentina. Anyone who watched only the final saw a different footballer from the one who got Argentina to it.
Major League Soccer, the day job
Messi has played his club football in Florida since the summer of 2023, which is the only reason an MLS ranking has him in it at all. He won the Leagues Cup in his first months at Inter Miami and the Supporters' Shield in 2024.10
His 2025 regular season was 29 goals and 19 assists in 28 matches: the Golden Boot, and a second consecutive league MVP award.11
Inter Miami then won the MLS Cup on 7 December 2025, beating Vancouver in the final, with Messi named the final's most valuable player.11
David Beckham, in the frame below, came in 2007 to do roughly what Messi is doing now, and he co-owns the club that signed him. Landon Donovan built a whole career in this league with none of that attention, which is the case against every imported name in it.
The Guardiola years
Pep Guardiola coached Messi for four seasons at Barcelona, and this list holds the version of him those seasons produced: a forward moved into midfield with the team rebuilt around the move.
In 2009 that team won six competitions in a single calendar year, the league and cup and Champions League, both Super Cups, and Barcelona's first Club World Cup.12
Guardiola's last season, 2011/12, was Messi's largest: 73 goals in official matches, still the club record.3
The counter-case is Kevin De Bruyne, who spent nine seasons in Guardiola's Manchester City teams, more than twice as long as Messi had him.
The No. 10 shirt
Inter Miami list Messi as their number 10, the number he also wears for Argentina.13 This ranking is about what the shirt meant before him: Pelé's in 1970, Maradona's in 1986, and Michel Platini's, in the frame below.
Free kicks: Juninho's territory
Free kicks are the narrowest skill on this page, and the one where Messi is famous without owning the category. The specialists around him did nothing else as well: Juninho Pernambucano at Lyon, Roberto Carlos, Andrea Pirlo and David Beckham.
The veterans' list
Messi is on this list by the calendar. At 39 years and 21 days he became the oldest outfield player to appear in a World Cup semi-final, which is how one name ends up on both a 2026 tournament ranking and an over-35 one.4
The category built for him
Inter Miami's team sheet gives Messi's height as 5ft 7in.13 That measurement is what qualifies him for this ranking, and his career is why anyone drew the category.
Barcelona took him out of Rosario as a boy and put him in their league side at 17.3
Andrés Iniesta, Xavi and Maradona give the ranking its pattern, and it is a position rather than a country: the small players cluster in midfield and just in front of it.
Of the 16 questions here, this is the only one whose entry requirement is something Messi never chose.
Rome, 2009: one header
One ranking on this page measures a single moment of Messi's career instead of the career.
On 27 May 2009 at the Stadio Olimpico, Barcelona beat Manchester United 2-0. Samuel Eto'o scored early, Messi headed in the second on 70 minutes, and the win completed the treble.12
The frame below sets that header against Steven Gerrard's goal in the 2005 final, and the two do different jobs. Messi's made a one-goal lead safe. Gerrard's started a comeback from 3-0 down in Istanbul.
On a list about importance, that difference is the case against Rome.
June's record, July's final
Sixteen questions produced sixteen different Messis, and the widest gap between them opened inside a single month: June finished with him holding the World Cup scoring record, July with him losing a final in which he barely had the ball. He is signed in Florida until the end of the 2028 season, so several of these questions do not have final answers yet.10
Every ranking on this page is settled one pair at a time, readers choosing between two names until an order appears. If there is a footballer you defend in every comment section, build the list yourself and see who ends up standing next to him.
More rankings, more angles
- Messi vs Ronaldo, Ranked Side by Side — the two of them in the same frames at last
- Kylian Mbappé Is on Every List, Never in the Same Place — the man who took the World Cup scoring record off him
- How Many Ways Can You Rank Luka Modrić? — worst signing of 2013, best player of 2018
- Pelé vs Maradona — the Answer Changes With the Question — the two names every Messi debate reaches back to
Sources
- ESPN — player ratings for the 2026 World Cup semi-final: Messi 9/10, the 92nd-minute cross for Lautaro Martínez, Argentina 2-1 England on 15 July 2026: espn.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- ESPN — player ratings for the 2026 World Cup final: Messi 3/10, one touch in the first 15 minutes, Ferran Torres' 106th-minute winner, 11 saves by Emiliano Martínez: espn.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- FC Barcelona — Messi's club records: 778 matches, 672 goals, 305 assists, 35 trophies, 10 La Liga titles, 4 Champions Leagues, 120 Champions League goals, 73 goals in 2011/12, the eight Ballon d'Or years, his October 2004 league debut, and passing Pelé's 643 goals for one club: fcbarcelona.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- ESPN — 2026 World Cup statistics: Messi's eight goals and four assists, 99 chances created at World Cups against Maradona's 71, and the oldest outfield player in a World Cup semi-final at 39 years and 21 days: espn.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Guinness World Records — most goals in the Spanish top division: 474 by Messi, 1 May 2005 to 16 May 2021, and eight seasons as leading scorer: guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- CONMEBOL Copa América — the 2021 final at the Maracanã: Di María's 22nd-minute goal, Argentina's 28-year wait, Messi as best player, joint top scorer on four goals and leading assister on five: copaamerica.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- CONMEBOL Copa América — the 2024 final in Miami Gardens: Lautaro Martínez's 112th-minute goal, Argentina's record 16th title, Messi substituted in the 65th minute in pain: copaamerica.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Sky Sports — Messi's hat-trick against Algeria matching Klose's 16 goals, then two against Austria on 23 June 2026 to break the World Cup scoring record: skysports.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Yahoo Sports — the all-time World Cup scoring list after 2026: Mbappé 22 after two goals against England in the third-place match, Messi 21, Klose 16: sports.yahoo.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Inter Miami CF — Messi's contract extension through the end of the 2028 MLS season, and his arrival in summer 2023: intermiamicf.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Inter Miami CF — 2025 season review: 29 goals and 19 assists in 28 regular-season matches, the MLS Golden Boot, a second straight MVP award, the MLS Cup won on 7 December 2025 against Vancouver, and MLS Cup MVP: intermiamicf.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- FC Barcelona — the 2009 final in Rome on 27 May: 2-0 against Manchester United, Eto'o and Messi's 70th-minute header, the treble, and the six trophies Barcelona won that calendar year: fcbarcelona.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Inter Miami CF — official squad listing for Messi: number 10, 5ft 7in, born 24 June 1987 in Rosario: intermiamicf.com (checked 2026-08-03)