Messi pulled off the greatest individual comeback in World Cup history
The report released today by Opta on Lionel Messi is truly mind-blowing in every detail!
Opta reported that Messi is the player who contributed the most shots in the World Cup with 59 shots—34 of which were taken by Messi himself, and 25 chances he created resulted in shots. This is the highest rate of his World Cup career, surpassing the 2022 World Cup, where he contributed 53 shots!
What’s staggering here is that the second-highest player after Messi is Achraf Hakimi with 31 shots—a difference of nearly double. And imagine that the second-highest player on the Argentine team is Mac Allister with 18 shots—a difference of more than three times as many.
And what’s even more mind-boggling is that there are only seven players who’ve managed to contribute 30 shots and account for half of their team’s total shots in a single World Cup—and two of those seven players are named Messi:
Messi from the 2022 World Cup and Messi from the 2026 World Cup. He’s the only one whose name appears twice!
Not only that, but imagine this: in the last two World Cups, Messi contributed 22 goals in 14 matches—double the number of goals he scored in four World Cups from 2006 to 2018, where he contributed 11 goals in 19 matches.
and in the knockout stages, he contributed 13 goals in 8 matches across the last two tournaments—and just imagine, he didn’t score a single goal in the knockout stages during the four tournaments from 2006 to 2018!
All these numbers tell you that Messi pulled off the greatest individual comeback in World Cup history—from a player who had nothing to show for himself until the 2018 World Cup to a player who dominated everything in the last two tournaments at ages 35 and 39.
It’s a miracle in every sense of the word.
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Messi pulled off the greatest individual comeback in World Cup history
Messi pulled off the greatest individual comeback in World Cup history
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