Soccer isn't supposed to be easy to understand.
Data companies collect millions of data points, and that's only for what's happening with the ball. Tracking information, a newer technology in the space, now layers in millions more, updating the position of all 22 players and the ball multiple times per second. And that's all just for a single game.
The complex interplay of everyone on the field, the fact that a player can pretty much do anything he wants with the ball other than pick it up with his hands, the volatility of a bouncing ball interacting with the oddly shaped human foot -- it all adds up to the most popular game in the world, one that's so dynamic and unpredictable that we're left with no choice but to reach for magical or religious metaphors to make sense of what we're seeing.
The one player who both embodies and defies all of this is Lionel Messi. He has spent 20 years doing the impossible: making soccer easy to understand. He's the greatest we've ever seen because he's the greatest at everything we see: scoring goals, creating chances, dribbling, passing, even walking.
That's still true, but it didn't feel that way before the 2026 World Cup started. Coming into the tournament, we had lost the defining modern feature of the sport: knowing that Lionel Messi is better than everyone else.
He had spent the past four years dominating Major League Soccer, but his performance had been close to the same as what we saw from him in Europe, despite the steep decline in his competition. And the last time we saw him play in a major tournament, the 2024 Copa America, he scored only once, assisted only once and came off injured in a final that Argentina won in extra time without him.
Messi was 38 when the 2026 World Cup began and turned 39 halfway through it. The proper expectation, it seemed, was for him to contribute some moments of brilliance on the margins, to help Argentina win but not be the reason Argentina win. Instead, he has done what he's always done and proved that he's still the best soccer player alive.
Four years ago, I was a little more equivocal about the idea, but after this summer I might not even be willing to concede that it's arguable: Lionel Messi is officially the greatest male athlete we've ever seen. Period.
How Messi is still the best at 39
Earlier this summer, analyst Michael Caley put some even more definitive data behind what I wrote about four years ago and have been writing about, seemingly, for the past decade: why there's no debate about who the greatest soccer player of all time is.
Here's how Caley put it:
"Lionel Messi was not the best player of his era. He was the three best players of his era.
He was roughly tied with Cristiano Ronaldo as the greatest goal-scorer. He stands alone as the greatest chance creator, with Ángel Di María, Neymar and De Bruyne his only competitors at his peak level. And he was the greatest ball progressor, with only perhaps Eden Hazard in the same class in his best seasons."
When a team has the ball, there are three simple phases of achievement: moving the ball up the field, moving the ball into position for a shot to be taken and taking shots when the ball gets near the goal. Goal scorers need someone to pass the ball to them, and creators need someone to get them the ball in a position from where they can create.
Messi was the best at all three phases of the game. And the amazing thing about what we've seen this summer is that's all still true.
Now, while you will hear announcers tell you that Messi looks as good as he ever has, that is simply not true. There was a two-year stretch when he scored 96 goals and added 27 assists for Barcelona across 64 starts when LaLiga was the best league in the world. He's not doing that anymore, but he still is doing everything at a higher level than anyone else.
He is tied with Kylian Mbappé of France atop the goal-scoring charts for this World Cup, with eight goals. And that's not just a random hot run of finishing or anything like that. No, Messi leads all players at the World Cup with 34 shots attempted.
The dots here are sized by expected-goal value, or the average probability of the chance being scored. The larger the circle, the higher the xG value of the attempt:
While Messi -- what a bum -- is only second in assists (four, behind France attacker Michael Olise), assists are a noisy number. You get one if you pass a ball sideways and your teammate rips a shot into the upper corner from 35 yards out. You don't get one if you split an inch-perfect pass through six defenders and a goalkeeper but your teammate somehow misses the net.
Instead, we can look at expected assists, or xA, which awards players based on where they're completing their passes. If you complete a pass to a teammate in a location where goals are scored, say, 50% of the time, you get 0.5 expected assists for the pass. And Messi, of course, is leading all players at the 2026 World Cup in expected assists.
Most players can't even do both of these things. Just take a look at Mbappé and Norway striker Erling Haaland, the two other goal-scoring sensations from this summer. They've combined for 1.7 expected assists -- just over half of what Messi has produced by himself.
If barely anyone else can score and create, then no one else can score, create and move the ball up the field. The stats app Futi tracks progressive passes and progressive carries. These are passes and carries that move the ball at least 25% of the remaining distance toward the opposition goal.
With one game to go -- the World Cup final against Spain -- Messi has completed 68 progressive passes; that's 20 more than anyone else in the tournament. And he has made 45 progressive carries; that's three more than his opponent Sunday and potential heir apparent, the 19-year-old Barcelona winger Lamine Yamal. Here, courtesy of Futi, is how all of that looks together:
Just in case it wasn't clear already, Messi is also shattering metrics that didn't even exist when he won his first Ballon d'Or. Futi created a possession-value model that "measures how much each touch changes the probability of scoring or conceding." These models help highlight players who do more than score goals and also better contextualize players who score goals but do little else.
To make the numbers easier to understand, Futi adjusts for the player's role and then normalizes their possession-value ratings on a percentile scale, where a 50 means you're providing an average amount of value. Among the four teams that reached the World Cup semifinals, Mbappé was the second-highest-rated player, at 83.
Messi? He's a 99.
Why Messi is officially the best male athlete of all time
When I talk about Messi being the best athlete of all time, I want to be clear about something: Yes, I do think he would be a better quarterback than Tom Brady, a better golfer than Tiger Woods and a better power forward than LeBron James.
Obviously, I don't actually think that. "Athlete" has many different meanings, something that gets lost every summer when we all try to figure out how to fix American soccer.
The best middle-distance runner in the world has a very different body type than the best NBA player. Does being able to dunk mean you're a better athlete than someone who can run a mile in under four minutes? In fact, most soccer players have similar body types and muscle fibers to middle-distance runners because that's kind of what soccer is: lots of jogging and endurance with some sprinting sprinkled in.
Instead, to define the "best athlete," I think we need to look at just two criteria: How much better are you at your sport than the second-best person? And how many other people actually play that sport?
(We have to rule out the likes of Pelé and Diego Maradona because the sport simply wasn't as globalized or as competitive or as consistent when they played. Plus, Messi has now dominated for way longer than either of them ever did, across national team and club soccer. If you want to fly your flag for Pelé or Maradona still, then I won't stop you, but there's no way to make an argument for either one based on peak individual performance across their entire careers.)
We've already established that Messi is a lot better than the next-best player of the modern era of the sport. In the major American sports, there isn't any man who has a bigger gap between himself and the next-best guy than Messi does.
In the NFL, Tom Brady won a record seven Super Bowls and was still a superstar into his 40s, but he won only three MVP awards -- two other quarterbacks from Brady's own generation, Aaron Rodgers and Peyton Manning, won more. In the NBA, the debate over Michael Jordan and LeBron has been fueling the basketball economy for more than a decade. And in MLB, you'll hear reasonable arguments for Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds and Shohei Ohtani.
Instead, the closest thing to Messi-like undisputed dominance comes in the NHL, where Wayne Gretzky still holds claim to the most incredible individual record in sports. Gretzky scored 894 goals in his career -- the second most all time. But if Gretzky never scored a single goal, he would still have more combined goals+assists than anyone else in NHL history.
Unfortunately, Gretzky -- and all of the others mentioned thus far -- fall by the wayside in this analysis. Gretzky dominated a sport that requires an ice rink and isn't played by most of the rest of the world. American football is, well, just look at the name. Baseball has a global reach, but it barely exists in Africa, Europe and most of South America. And though the NBA is becoming increasingly globalized, it still can't come close to matching soccer's reach.
As I mentioned in 2022, researchers in Australia found that only about 5% of the global population has the physical capacity to play basketball because of the size it requires. However, nearly 30% of the global population has the physical traits you might find on a soccer field. Another survey found that twice as many people across the globe play soccer as do basketball.
Given how popular soccer is and how much better Messi is than the next-best soccer player, there's really only one other sport where someone could lay claim to being so much better than as many other people who participate in their sport.
It's not tennis, an incredibly popular sport but one with many financial filters at an early age and an ongoing argument over who the best player ever really was. And it's not cricket, where the Australian Don Bradman holds a similar level of statistical dominance as Messi -- and perhaps even a greater level of statistical dominance -- because his career was limited and he played before major countries like India and Pakistan had competitive teams.
Other studies, unsurprisingly, have found that soccer and running are the two most popular leisure activities in the world. For one, you just need a ball. For the other, you don't need a ball. And to get even more specific, short-distance sprinting, in particular, is accessible to every able-bodied person in the world.
The history of sprinting has, in fact, produced one Messi-like athlete: Usain Bolt, the only person to win the 100- and 200-meter dash in three consecutive Olympics. Not only that, he set the world records for both races in 2009 -- and both still stand to this day.
Like Messi, Bolt has the extreme highs, the unmatched longevity and the versatility. Only eight other men have won gold in both the 100 and 200 in the same Olympics. No one else did it twice; Bolt has done it three times. Despite theoretically increasing technological advancements in sprinting, Bolt's records have stood for 17 years and counting. And he's the oldest person (29) to win gold in the 200.
In 2022, I was inclined to give the edge to Bolt over Messi: Everyone can run, and he was so much better at running than any person who has ever lived. But, four years later, I'm no longer sure that comparison is right.
Messi won his first Ballon d'Or in 2009, for his age-21 season. He's currently 39, and based on what we've just watched this summer, he's still the best player in the world. Bolt won his first gold in an Olympics or world championship at 21, too. But his last came at 29. That gives Messi an extra 10 years -- a full decade -- at the top.
Soccer is the most competitive team sport on the planet, and at worst, it's the second-most competitive of all sports outside of running. Messi has been better than everyone else at soccer for almost 20 years at this point. His run at this World Cup, in my opinion, has stretched the lead he has held over the rest of the soccer world to the lead he now has on the rest of the sports world.
He's the best male athlete of all time -- and no, it's not even close.
