Why Lionel Messi is the best male athlete of all time

Last week, scientists studying fusion power at the National Ignition Facility of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced they’d finally made a breakthrough. Using magnets and lasers — and I’m vastly oversimplifying here — the NIF researchers were able to create hydrogen fusion with an energy gain for the first time ever.

In the past, they’d been able to successfully combine hydrogen atoms, but the energy needed to do so always exceeded the energy released from the fusion itself. While the gain was still minor, if the process can ever be made more efficient, it would provide a hyper-powerful, clean and renewable alternative to fossil fuels.

I wonder, though, if any of the scientists have ever tried converting all of the power put into another seemingly renewable and insatiable energy resource: The debate on the Internet about whether Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo is better at soccer.

While it used to be an actual rivalry on the field when Messi was with Barcelona and Ronaldo was with Real Madrid, they’ve played against each other just twice over the past four years. And yet, every day, two armies of anonymous avatars go to battle on social media, posting in the comments of tweets and Instagram posts about the other player, making the same jokes, and replacing the first letter of the other player’s name with a “P.” (This is penalty kick humor.) Every bit of Messi’s success diminishes Ronaldo, and everything Ronaldo does must verify that he did it better than Messi.

In my experience of occasionally being attacked by these people across various platforms, Ronaldo’s fans seem to value a kind of alpha-male bullying dominance that finds virtue in making other people feel bad, while the worst Messi supporters view him as a kind of god-on-earth who has only ever criticized by unworthy heretics. It’s completely toxic and unfortunate, and it says a lot of not-so-great things about how happy people are across the world and how social media plays up and exploits our worst instincts as people.

It’s also just, you know, wrong; it’s like arguing over whether five is more than three. Regardless of whether Lionel Messi wins the World Cup with Argentina on Sunday, the conversation shouldn’t be about whether he’s better than Ronaldo or any other soccer player. No, Messi’s career ultimately warrants a new question entirely: Is he the greatest athlete of all time?

Why Messi is the best soccer player of all time
When it comes to goal scoring, Messi and Ronaldo remain roughly equivalent. Stats Perform only has data going back to the 2010 season, but across Europe’s five major leagues (England, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain), they’re the only two players who have scored at least 300 non-penalty goals over that stretch. Messi has 347 goals and Ronaldo has 316. Given that Ronaldo is two years older than Messi, perhaps using that stretch of time favors Messi slightly, so we’ll be generous and call it even.

They’re both also in a select group of 10 players who have notched at least 100 assists in the Big Five leagues since the start of the 2010-11 season. Ronaldo ranks seventh with 105 … and this is where the comparisons between the two start to look silly. Over that same stretch, Messi has created 179 assists — more than any other player. All together, that gives Messi 526 non-penalty goals and assists since 2010. Ronaldo is second with 421. In other words, Messi has contributed 25% more goals than the next-best player. In fact, Ronaldo is closer to Luis Suarez (331) in fourth than to Messi in first.

Real quick: We’re working off the assumption here that attackers are generally the best players in soccer because goals are so scarce, forwards cost the most in the transfer market and scoring goals requires a much higher degree of precision than defending or midfield play. Take that assumption, combine it with the above graph and you have — quite clearly — the best soccer player in the world.

But even that underrates Messi’s impact. He’s not only the best scorer and best creator of the modern era, he’s also the best dribbler and the best facilitator. Since 2010, Messi has successfully dribbled past 1,816 players. The only other player above 1,000 is Eden Hazard with 1,188.

To measure “facilitation”, we can look at passes into the penalty area. The pass that creates the goal isn’t always the most valuable pass in a move; it might be the pass before the pass or the pass before the pass before the pass. Passes into the penalty area isn’t quite a one-to-one proxy, but the game simply changes when the ball moves into the penalty area, and given how valuable and crowded that area of the field is, the best passers are typically those who complete passes into the penalty area.

Since 2010, Messi has completed 1,992 passes into the opponent’s box — over 500 more than Real Sociedad’s David Silva (1,404) in second place.

Here — again — is how this all looks in chart form:

Messi’s multifaceted dominance has even spawned its own uber-specific Reddit page called “Top Right Messi,” where users simply share images of similar scatter-plots that feature Messi, alone, in the top right corner.

While I don’t think it’s even a question as to whether Lionel Messi is the best soccer player of the past, say, 30 years, there’s perhaps at least a reasonable argument for players from previous eras, like Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Pele, Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas. But those comparisons are really difficult because the game has become way more globalized over the past three decades. Almost all of the best players play in Europe now, either competing directly against each other or in leagues of at least similar quality. Maradona, famously, won Italy’s Serie A with unfancied Napoli, but he was also frequently scoring single-digit goals across entire seasons. Cruyff and Puskas played in eras where they were strictly competing against Europeans. And while Pele scored an absurd number of goals over his career, he never played in Europe.

Given how much more professionalized and competitive the game is than it was for any of those guys, it’s way harder to be as dominant as Messi has been than in previous eras. Heck, the guy who’s the second-best player after him has won the Ballon d’Or (given to the theoretical best soccer player in the world) five times — more than anyone other than Messi’s seven.

While it’s possible that some of the older greats were as dominant compared to their peers as Messi has been compared to his, I think Messi is playing against a much tougher and larger group of competitors, so we’re giving him the edge.