Why Messi is the best player at the World Cup -- and the best male athlete of all time
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- Lionel Messi is tied with France's Kylian Mbappé atop the 2026 World Cup goal-scoring charts with eight goals each, and leads all players with 34 shots attempted.
- Messi also leads the tournament in expected assists and has completed 68 progressive passes — 20 more than anyone else — plus 45 progressive carries, three more than Spain's 19-year-old Lamine Yamal.
- Messi's Futi possession-value rating sits at the 99th percentile, compared with Mbappé's 83 among semifinal-round players, underscoring how much value he adds per touch relative to peers.
- Analyst Michael Caley frames Messi's career dominance as 'the three best players of his era' — roughly tied with Cristiano Ronaldo as the top scorer, alone as the greatest chance creator, and the top ball progressor.
- The article's framework for 'best athlete' combines the gap to the second-best player with the sport's global participant base — soccer's reach (~30% of the global population has the physical traits for it, per Australian researchers) dwarfs basketball (~5%), which the piece uses to dismiss Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Babe Ruth.
- Messi, who turned 39 during this tournament, is set to face Spain in the final after a 2024 Copa América in which he scored once, assisted once, and left the final injured.
Why it matters: The piece reframes a GOAT debate by quantifying Messi's dominance at age 39 with tournament-leading shot volume (34), expected assists, and a 99th-percentile possession value, then layering on a participant-base argument that rules out American sports because only ~5% of the global population can physically play basketball versus ~30% for soccer — meaning the same statistical gap to a peer means more in a sport with a deeper talent pool.
