Lionel Messi scored three times against Algeria on Tuesday night in his 200th international appearance, and in the process tied the most consequential record in men’s World Cup history — Miroslav Klose’s 16 all-time goals — and he did it at 38 years old, two years older than Klose was when he set it.
That is not a typo. That is the actual sentence.
Argentina’s 3-0 win at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City arrived in waves: a 17th-minute opener, then a second in the 60th, then the third in the 76th — Messi’s first-ever hat-trick at a World Cup across six tournaments and 24 previous matches. The crowd understood exactly what was happening. So did he.
There’s an important distinction that keeps getting blurred in the celebration: Messi surpassed Pelé earlier in this tournament in combined World Cup goals and assists — 24 total (16 goals plus 8 assists) against Pelé’s 21. That is a different record, and a legitimate one, but it is not the outright goals record. The outright goals record belonged solely to Klose. It now belongs to both of them.
Klose reached 16 across four tournaments — five in 2002, five in 2006, four in 2010, two in 2014. He played 24 matches and his career was finished when Germany lifted the trophy in Brazil in 2014; he was 36 at the time. Messi has now equaled that total in his sixth tournament, having just turned 38, and Argentina still has at minimum four matches left in this one. The only question about whether Messi breaks the record outright is when, not if.
What happened after the first goal was something else entirely. Messi broke into tears on the pitch, and in the post-match press conference he explained it plainly: “Honestly, completely unrelated to the sport, I went through some difficult, complicated days.” He thanked his teammates. He did not elaborate. The record and whatever he had privately endured arrived on the same night, and that combination is its own kind of story.
https://x.com/ESPNFC/status/2067074741664358795
I watched that first-goal sequence three times before I wrote a single word of this column. The way he composed himself to finish, the way the tears arrived the instant the ball hit the net — it was one of those moments that makes the athletic achievement feel secondary to the human one, and that almost never happens at this scale.
https://x.com/FOXSports/status/2067075370298356039
The Sky Sports match report cataloged the additional records falling around Messi like afterthoughts: oldest player to score a World Cup hat-trick, first player to score a World Cup goal against 11 different nations, first player to appear in six World Cups. The argument about whether he was the GOAT of this competition was always strange — the man was already the combined contributions leader, and now he’s co-holder of the outright goals record with games still to play.
Argentina’s path from here runs through Austria on June 22 at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, then Jordan on June 27 to close the group stage. Win the group — which Argentina is the heavy favorite to do — and the knockout bracket opens on July 3 against the Group H runner-up in Miami. Beyond that, if form holds, the Argentina-Portugal collision course looks increasingly inevitable. You can follow the full picture across our World Cup 2026 coverage.
beIN Sports notes that Messi reached 200 caps trailing only Kuwait’s Bader Al-Mutawa at 202 and Ronaldo at 228 in total international appearances. The records are arriving faster than anyone can annotate them. And if you read our World Cup preview from earlier this month, you know we said Argentina wouldn’t lose this tournament while Messi was breathing. That position has not changed.
Klose’s 16 held for twelve years. It will fall before this tournament ends.
