Doing so only scratches the surface of the Argentinian’s genius, with Messi arguably the best passer, dribbler, free-kick taker and all-round playmaker in the history of football.
And while all of these skills have undeniably helped boost his goal tally, quantifying the 38-year-old by the metric of how many times he has put the ball in the net says little about the wider impact he has had in the 1,142 games he has played.
Nevertheless, with Messi having scored his 900th career goal on Wednesday night for Inter Miami against Nashville SC, The Athletic pulls back the curtain and explores the numbers and statistics behind one of the finest bodies of work sport has ever seen.
Let’s start with the teams Messi has scored his 900 goals for, which are his three club sides and Argentina.
He played for Barcelona from 2004 to 2021, Paris Saint-Germain from 2021 to 2023 and has been at Inter Miami in Florida since leaving the French capital. Meanwhile, Messi’s international debut came in 2005 — when he was sent off against Hungary — and he is still playing for his country.
The 672 goals he registered at Barcelona are the most anyone has ever scored at a single club in the history of top-level football, with Messi surpassing Pele’s 643 at Brazilian side Santos when he found the net against Real Valladolid in December 2020.
That figure of 672 also means that 6.97 per cent of the competitive goals scored in Barcelona’s history have been by Messi. The Spanish club have existed for 126 years and the Argentinian spent only 17 years playing for them.
As for his output for his country, only Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo (143) has scored more international goals than the 115 Messi has for Argentina. Seven of those 115 came at the 2022 World Cup, when Messi became the first player in history to score in the group stage, round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final of one edition of the tournament.
Messi and Ronaldo have rewritten the record books during their careers (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
Now let’s break his goals down by year.
Messi didn’t score in 2004, when he made his professional debut, but has found the net in every calendar year since, with his first goal coming against Albacete in La Liga on May 1, 2005, in what was his ninth career appearance.
Messi scored at least 45 goals in every year of the 2010s, with the astonishing 91 in 2012 the most in a year by any professional player in the history of the sport — eclipsing Bayern Munich and West Germany forward Gerd Muller’s long-standing record of 85, which was set in 1972. That haul means that, for now, more than 10 per cent of Messi’s career goals were scored in 2012.
Despite his astonishing prowess that year, the Argentinian won just one trophy: the Copa del Rey, scoring as Barcelona beat Athletic Club 3-0 in the final.
That goal is one of Messi’s 56 in the Copa del Rey, only finding the net more often in La Liga and the Champions League. Here are his 900 goals broken down by the 16 competitions in which they have been scored.
Messi has failed to score in three competitions that he has played in: the Coupe de France (two games for PSG), the U.S. Open Cup (one game for Inter Miami) and Finalissima (one game for Argentina).
Perhaps surprisingly, Messi is the outright all-time top scorer in just two competitions: La Liga and the Supercopa de Espana. However, by the middle of 2026, the Argentinian could well have the most goals to his name in the biggest tournament of them all, as he is currently just three behind Germany’s Miroslav Klose’s World Cup record of 16.
Overall in Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) Messi has scored 496 goals — the most in history and one more than next-best Ronaldo, with the Argentinian’s strike against Strasbourg in May 2023 seeing him overhaul his great contemporary at the top of this particular list.
Thirty-three of those 496 goals came when Messi scored in 21 (yes, 21) La Liga games in a row in the 2012-13 season, which is 10 more matches than anyone else has ever found the net in consecutively in the Spanish top flight.
The most games in a row in all competitions Messi has scored in is 10, which he has achieved on two occasions: across October and November 2010 and then again across December 2012 and January 2013. Both streaks ended with a blank against Real Madrid, with the first of those El Clasico matches seeing Barcelona win 5-0 despite Messi not finding the net.
Lionel Messi’s numbers are laughably good (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
Overall, Messi has scored against 160 different teams for club and country, with Spanish side Sevilla suffering the most at the feet and head of the Argentinian. The 38 goals he has netted against them is the same number that Diego Maradona scored in total for Barcelona during his two seasons at the Catalan club in the 1980s.
Sevilla are one of 12 sides that Messi has scored 20+goals against, with all of them Spanish clubs.
Nashville SC are the non-Spanish outfit that Messi has scored against the most, hitting 16 against the side from Tennessee.
When it comes to international football, the Rosario-born great has scored against 39 different sides (four more than there are countries in North and South America combined). Here they all are.
There are 12 sides that Messi has played more than once and never scored against, with Qatar — the scene of his greatest triumph — the only national team to feature on this list.
When it comes to where he has scored on the pitch, Messi has hit 724 of his 900 goals from inside the penalty box, with 112 of these penalties. He has netted a further 11 times from the spot in shootouts (taking his team’s first penalty on each occasion), but these do not count towards his career goals total.
Meanwhile, he has scored 176 times from outside the box. This figure includes an incredible 70 free kicks, with Messi scoring at least one in every year from 2008 onwards. His best return is the 10 he netted in 2018, which is two more free kicks than Ronaldo scored in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 combined.
Of the 900 goals, Messi has scored 756 of them with his stronger left foot, 110 with his right foot, 30 with his head, two with his chest (firstly against Estudiantes de La Plata in the 2009 Club World Cup final and then versus Orlando City in MLS in 2024) one with his hip (against Getafe in the Copa del Rey in 2014) and one with his left hand (against Espanyol in La Liga in 2007). This means Messi has scored more goals with both his hip and left hand (one each) than Liverpool’s Joe Gomez has scored in his entire first-team career with any body part (zero).
The Argentinian has scored a remarkable 60 hat-tricks across his career, with 2008 the last completed year in which he failed to achieve the feat. His first, against Real Madrid in March 2007, ended a 12-game run without scoring, which remains the longest drought of his career.
As you can see, Messi has scored five goals in a game twice, with these two hauls coming more than 10 years apart (vs Bayer Leverkusen in March 2012 and Estonia in June 2022).
Those goals against Leverkusen in the Champions League made up one of nine Messi hat-tricks in 2012, which is the most trebles he has scored in a calendar year. He played 69 games in those 12 months, averaging a hat-trick every 7.7 matches.
Messi has scored 70 direct free kicks during his career (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
One of the incredibly small number of things that the Argentinian has not yet achieved on a football field is a ‘perfect’ hat-trick, which is when a player scores with both feet and their head in the same game. This is one of the few metrics in the sport where Messi is inferior to Kevin Nolan.
Something else Messi has not yet done is score in the first 60 seconds of a match, with the Argentinian finding the net in every other minute of the 90 (as well as twice in extra time). This, meanwhile, is one of the few metrics in the sport where Messi is inferior to Shane Long.
When it comes to assisting Messi, 105 men (and counting) will be able to tell any grandchildren that they did so — from Ronaldinho for that first goal in 2005 to Inter Miami’s Sergio Reguilon who teed him up for number 900.
Current club team-mate Luis Suarez, who also played with Messi at Barcelona, has provided the most assists for the Argentinian with 61.
As for opposition goalkeepers, a whopping 268 have been beaten by Messi in his more-than two-decade career. Diego Alves, who played against the Argentinian for Spanish clubs Almeria and Valencia, has conceded more goals than anyone else.
In March 2010, while playing for Barcelona against Stuttgart in the Champions League, Messi scored twice against Jens Lehmann, who was born in November 1969. This makes the German the earliest-born goalkeeper to concede to Messi, with Philadelphia Union’s Andrew Rick (January 2006) the most-recently born.
Now, here is where in the world Messi’s 900 goals have been scored. Unsurprisingly, the majority of them (624) have been in Spain, with the U.S. next, having played host to 96 of his strikes.
Angola is the country where Messi scored for the first time most recently, netting there for Argentina in a friendly in November 2025. That goal was also Messi’s first in Africa, leaving Oceania as the only permanently-inhabited continent he has yet to score on (he has played two games there).
So, how many goals will Messi end his career with? Will he reach 1,000? And could he surpass Ronaldo, who is currently on 965, and officially become the top scorer in the sport’s history?
The Argentinian’s latest contract at Inter Miami, which he signed in October 2025, will see him through to the end of 2028, all being well, so three more seasons. In his two full campaigns in the U.S. so far (he joined mid-season in 2023), Messi has scored 23 goals (in 2024) and 43 goals (in 2025), at an average of 33.
So if he can continue at this pace, he should finish his storied career around the 1,000-goal mark, and that’s not factoring in goals for Argentina — with his international retirement still to materialise.
As for catching Ronaldo, well, Messi is more than two years younger than the Portuguese (whose current contract at Saudi Arabian side Al Nassr expires in the summer of 2027) so, in theory, has longer left to keep racking up the goals.
Yet it is hard to avoid the feeling that Ronaldo will happily play forever if it guarantees that he ends up scoring more goals than Messi.
