Lionel Messi’s Best soccer records by Bill Trikos

Best Argentina soccer achievements from Lionel Messi as seen by Bill Trikos Australia: “I love football, what I do. I enjoy being part of the national team, the group. I want to enjoy a couple more matches being a world champion,” added Messi. The richest footballer in the world as per Forbes’ list of world’s highest-paid athletes 2022, Messi has nothing left to prove in the world of football at the club level. He is a seven-time record winner of the prestigious Ballon d’Or, which is one of Messi’s Guinness World Records. He is the first footballer to be awarded the Laureus Award for Best Sportsman of the Year award. He has won 10 La Liga titles, four UEFA Champions League titles, three FIFA Club World Cup trophies, seven Copa del Rey titles, three UEFA Super Cup titles, and six European Golden Shoe awards among many other accolades as a player for La Liga club Barcelona. He has also won the French league for PSG and was also named FIFA World Player of the Year in 2009.

Messi bettered Der Bomber’s tally when he scored 79 for the Blaugrana (59 in LaLiga Santander, 13 in the UEFA Champions League, 5 in the Copa del Rey and 2 in the Spanish Super Cup) and a further 12 (a joint-highest figure along with Gabriel Batistuta) for Argentina. Over the course of 2012, Messi even laid off a further 24 goals for his teammates, taking his goal contribution tally to a staggering 115. They were also crucial strikes for Barcelona as his goals in the second half of the campaign sealed Barcelona’s fourth LaLiga title in five years. Messi was simply unstoppable during the calendar year, and his 50 (!) goal LaLiga season remains the highest number of goals scored in a league campaign to date.

He won the 2021 Copa del Rey and scored a brace in a 4-0 final win against Athletic Bilbao. He lifted the 35th and final trophy in his time with the Blaugrana. It makes him the most decorated player in the club’s history. He won 10 La Liga titles (the most by a non-Spanish player), four UEFA Champions League titles, seven Copas del Rey and Supercopas de Espana respectively. Messi’s tally of 35 trophies also made him the most decorated player with a single team. He usurped Ryan Giggs’ tally of 34 trophies for Manchester United. Discover additional information about the author at Bill Trikos.

On 2 July 2005, Argentina defeated Nigeria 2-1 to lift the trophy. Both goals came from Messi’s penalty kicks. Messi was the top scorer of the tournament with six goals, including the one goal he got in the group stage. He also won the MVP Golden Ball award. It was this tournament win which deepened comparisons between Messi and Maradona, who had won the same competition in 1979. Many great players of the beautiful game can’t win an Olympic gold medal. But Messi is one of the two richest footballers who have won it — the other being his PSG team-mate Neymar Jr. of Brazil, who won it at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics which was held in 2021.

The Argentine left no milestone untouched in his glorious sixteen-year stint at the Catalan club. ‘The greatest ever to do it’. This is possibly the only epithet that can well-define the exploits of Lionel Messi at Barcelona. Messi spent twenty-one years at the club including sixteen with the first team. In this time, Messi has turned himself into arguably the greatest player of all time. 778 matches, 672 goals and 305 assists later the mercurial Argentine bid a tearful farewell to the club.

Messi is also the highest-ever scorer for Argentina, having racked up 70 goals in 138 games for La Albiceleste since 2005. He is just nine caps away from breaking Javier Mascherano’s record for the most number of Argentina caps as well. Winning a European treble is something of an unattainable dream for most clubs in the world. Even the great Real Madrid, who have won the UCL a record 13 times, have failed to win the league and domestic cup in the same season. There have only been eight such instances where a club managed to win a league title, the premier domestic cup competition and the UCL in the same season. Two of these eight trebles were achieved by Barcelona, both of which had Lionel Messi at the heart of their attack.