Football is not a game that reveals itself easily to comprehension. Data companies capture millions of data points solely on what transpires with the ball. Sports-tracking technology now overlays millions more on top of that, updating the coordinates of all twenty-two players and the ball multiple times per second. And all of this is generated for a single match.
The complex, interdependent web connecting everyone on the pitch, the freedom to control the ball with any limb except the hands, and the eccentric physics of human feet interacting with a bouncing leather sphere—all have combined to make it the most popular game on earth. It is so dynamic, so wildly unpredictable, that we frequently find ourselves retreating into magical or theological metaphors just to articulate what unfolds upon the pitch.
The only footballer who embodies all of this, and yet transcends these very boundaries, is Lionel Messi. For twenty years, he has made the impossible look routine: making football readily comprehensible. He is the greatest of all time because in everything we witness on a football pitch—scoring goals, creating chances, dribbling, passing, even walking!—he is the pinnacle.
Yet before the 2026 World Cup kicked off, that reality seemed to have dimmed. Coming into the tournament, it was as though we had collectively forgotten that Lionel Messi stood head and shoulders above everyone else.
For four years, he had dominated Major League Soccer (MLS), yet even with the drop in competition compared to Europe, his underlying production remained absurdly consistent. The last time we had seen him in a major international tournament was at the 2024 Copa América. There, he managed merely a single goal and one assist, and was ultimately forced off through injury in the final, though Argentina claimed the trophy in extra time without him.
When the 2026 World Cup commenced, Messi was 38, turning 39 midway through the tournament. The consensus expectation was that he might offer a few incandescent cameos to help steer Argentina forward, but nobody expected him to be the primary engine of victory. Instead, he returned in his most iconic guise, reaffirming that he remains the finest living footballer on the planet.
While four years ago some still hesitated, after this World Cup there is simply no remaining room for dispute. Lionel Messi is officially the greatest male athlete of all time. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
How Messi Is Still the Best at Age 39
Earlier this summer, analyst Michael Caley drew upon a decade of writing to present concrete data demonstrating why there is no longer any debate regarding the greatest footballer of all time.
Caley framed it like this:
“Lionel Messi wasn’t just the best player of his generation. He was the best three players of his generation rolled into one. As a goalscorer, he matched Cristiano Ronaldo. As a playmaker and creator, he was peerless, with only the likes of Ángel Di María, Neymar, and Kevin De Bruyne coming close. And as a ball progressor, he was supreme, where perhaps only Eden Hazard in his absolute prime could rival Messi.”
When a team has the ball, success generally hinges on three distinct phases: progressing the ball upfield, advancing it into shooting positions, and taking the shot when close to goal. Goalscorers need playmakers to find them; playmakers need ball progressors to supply them in dangerous pockets.
Messi was the best at all three. And the most startling revelation of this World Cup is that this remains entirely true today.
You might hear commentators say Messi looks just as sublime as of old, but that isn’t quite accurate. During his Barcelona peak, when La Liga was the premier competition on the planet, he enjoyed a blistering stretch where he registered 96 goals and 27 assists in 64 matches. He no longer moves at that astonishing velocity, yet he continues to operate at a stratosphere well above the rest.
With eight goals, he enters the final locked in a duel with France’s Kylian Mbappé for the Golden Boot. And this is no fluke: Messi leads all players at this World Cup with 34 total shots.
Though he sits second in raw assists (trailing France’s Michael Olise’s four assists), assist totals can often be deceiving. You might play a routine sideways pass only for your teammate to uncork a 35-yard screamer into the top corner—and you get credited with an assist. Conversely, you can slice open six defenders and the goalkeeper with an exquisite through-ball, only for your teammate to scuff it wide of an empty net—and you get nothing.
Instead, we turn to ‘expected assists’ (xA), which evaluates the quality of chances created based on pass locations. If you thread a pass to a teammate from a spot where an average finish converts 50% of the time, that pass is worth 0.5 xA. Needless to say, at the 2026 World Cup, Messi leads all players in expected assists.
Most players cannot combine both roles. Take Mbappé and Norway’s Erling Haaland, the other two goal machines of modern football: combined, they produced 1.7 expected assists this summer—barely half of what Messi manufactured single-handedly.
And if combining elite scoring and elite chance creation is extraordinarily rare, doing both while also serving as your team’s primary ball progressor is virtually impossible. The analytics platform Footy tracks progressive passes and progressive carries—passes and runs with the ball that eat up at least 25% of the remaining distance toward the opponent’s goal.
Entering the World Cup final against Spain, Messi has completed 68 progressive passes—20 more than any other player in the tournament. On top of that, he has registered 45 progressive carries—three more than his adversary and prospective heir in Sunday’s final, 19-year-old Barcelona winger Lamine Yamal.
In case the point hasn’t hit home: Messi is obliterating metrics that didn’t even exist when he hoisted his first Ballon d’Or. Footy has built a possession-value model that measures how much every touch increases or decreases a team’s probability of scoring or conceding. These models don’t just highlight finishers; they illuminate the immense value provided by players who influence every phase of the game.
To make the numbers intuitive, Footy normalizes possession-value ratings across positions on a percentile scale, where 50 represents average contribution. Among all four semi-finalists, Mbappé posted the second-highest rating at 83. And Messi? His rating is 99.
Why Messi Is Officially the Greatest Male Athlete of All Time
Before crowning Messi the greatest athlete of all time, let me be clear: do I think he would have been a better quarterback than Tom Brady, a better golfer than Tiger Woods, or a better power forward than LeBron James?
Obviously not. The word ‘athlete’ carries a kaleidoscope of meanings that often gets flattened whenever we attempt to conceptualize American soccer every summer.
The physical profile of the world’s premier middle-distance runner is utterly different from that of an elite NBA superstar. Does the ability to throw down an emphatic dunk make someone a superior athlete to an individual who can run a sub-four-minute mile? In truth, the physiological demands on most footballers mirror those of middle-distance runners: the sport demands immense stamina, constant aerobic jogging, punctured by sudden, ferocious anaerobic sprints.
Instead, when defining the ‘greatest athlete,’ I believe we should weigh only two objective criteria: How far ahead of the second-best competitor in your sport were you? And how many people actually play your sport?
We must set aside icons like Pelé and Diego Maradona, because when they played, the sport was neither as globalized nor as ruthlessly competitive as it is today. Moreover, across both club and international football, Messi has dominated for a duration far exceeding either of their primes. If you still wish to argue for Pelé or Maradona, I won’t stop you, but across the peak and longevity of a complete career, neither presents a sustainable statistical case.
We have already established that Messi is leagues ahead of the second-best player of the modern era. Across major American sports, there is simply no athlete with a comparable gulf between themselves and their nearest peer.
In the NFL, Tom Brady won a record seven Super Bowls and remained a superstar well into his 40s, but he won only three MVP awards; contemporaries Aaron Rodgers and Peyton Manning each won more MVPs.
In the NBA, the debate over whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the greatest has consumed basketball circles for over a decade.
In MLB, legitimate arguments can be made for Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, or Shohei Ohtani.
Rather, the closest analogue to Messi’s unassailable supremacy is found in the NHL, where Wayne Gretzky still holds the most staggering statistical record in professional sports. Gretzky scored 894 career goals—second all-time. Yet if Gretzky had never scored a single goal, he would still possess more career points (goals plus assists) than any other player in NHL history.
Unfortunately for Gretzky, and everyone else mentioned thus far, this comparison falters under scrutiny. Gretzky dominated a sport that requires an ice rink, one virtually unplayed across vast swaths of the planet. American football’s reach is evident in its very title. Baseball retains a degree of international reach, yet is virtually nonexistent across most of Africa, Europe, and South America. And while the NBA continues to globalize, it remains an order of magnitude behind football’s universal footprint.
As noted back in 2022, Australian researchers found that due to stringent height and physiological prerequisites, only about 5 percent of the global population possesses the biomechanical capacity to play professional basketball. Conversely, roughly 30 percent of the human population possesses the physical attributes suited to a football pitch. Another survey revealed that global football participation doubles that of basketball.
Given how gargantuan football’s global participation is, and how far Messi stands above his closest rival, only one other sport can boast an individual with a claim to dominating such a colossal pool of competitors by such an astronomical margin.
It isn’t tennis. Though globally beloved, tennis erects formidable financial barriers from childhood, and a ferocious debate still rages over its undisputed GOAT. Nor is it cricket, where Australia’s Sir Don Bradman exerted a statistical supremacy equal to, or perhaps greater than, Messi’s—yet Bradman’s career was chronologically brief, and unfolded before global powerhouses like India and Pakistan even fielded competitive outfits.
It is no coincidence that studies routinely identify football and running as the two most ubiquitous recreational pastimes on earth. One requires merely a ball. The other doesn’t even need that. More specifically, short-distance sprinting is accessible to virtually every able-bodied human being alive.
And the history of sprinting produced an athlete of Messi’s stature: Usain Bolt, the only human to capture the 100-meter and 200-meter gold medals across three consecutive Olympic Games. Furthermore, in 2009 he set world records in both events that still stand unbroken today.
Like Messi, Bolt combined unfathomable dominance, longevity, and versatility. In all of Olympic history, only eight men have ever claimed the 100m and 200m double at the same Games. None has ever repeated the feat twice; Bolt achieved it three times. Despite seventeen years of theoretical advances in track and spike technology, Bolt’s marks remain untouched. And he remains the oldest man (at age 29) to win Olympic gold in the 200m.
Back in 2022, I leaned toward ranking Bolt slightly ahead of Messi: everyone can run, and Bolt was far superior at running than any human who ever lived. But four years later, I am no longer convinced that comparison holds.
Messi won his first Ballon d’Or in 2009 at age 21. Today, he is 39, and based on what we have witnessed this summer, he remains the finest player on the planet. Bolt also captured his first Olympic or World Championship gold at 21, but his final gold came at age 29. That grants Messi an additional ten years—an entire extra decade—at the absolute summit of his sport.
Football is the most fiercely contested team sport on this planet, and outside of running, the most competitive sporting endeavor known to humanity. Messi has stood atop that pyramid for nearly twenty years. In my view, his performance at this World Cup has elevated his supremacy beyond football, establishing him decisively across the entire sporting universe.
He is the greatest male athlete of all time, and no one else is close.
