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.
Here's how that looks in chart form:
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.
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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.
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"What about trophies," you ask?
Well, soccer is an 11-player sport, so individuals have much less of an influence on winning than they do in other sports. And, well, winning a World Cup is determined way more by where you're born than by how good you are at the sport. But it's not like Messi is lacking in those departments, either. He's won the Champions League four times, Spain's LaLiga 10 times, France's Ligue 1 once and South America's continental championship -- the Copa America -- once, and he's now made the World Cup final twice. He's won plenty.
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BRIEF INTERLUDE: What is an athlete?
Before we get to figuring out who might be the best athlete of all time, we should probably define the term "athlete."
Every four years, without fail, a handful of pundits who never watch soccer otherwise come out of the woodwork to claim, "If America's best athletes played soccer, we'd win the World Cup." This concept of athleticism is almost purely based on speed, size and strength. Reminder: Lionel Messi is, according to the site FBref, 5 feet, 6½ inches tall and weighs 159 pounds. I've stood next to Messi before; you'd pick me in a fight, and I was a mediocre Division I central midfielder for a couple of years.
While it is true that, say, Los Angeles Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald would defeat Lionel Messi in American football, basketball, boxing, wrestling, shot put, dead-lifting and countless other sports, we're not after a kind of universally applicable physical capacity. In the past, the gold medalist in the decathlon was referred to as the "best athlete in the world." So, by that definition, congrats are in order for Canada's Damian Warner.
No: Instead, we're defining an athlete simply as someone who plays a sport professionally. For our purposes today, we're limiting the discussion only to men. And to compare the athletes to each other, we're not looking at them based on how they'd perform in other sports. No, we're comparing them based on how good they are at their given sport, compared to the level of their competition and the performance of their peers.
So who is the greatest athlete of all time?
We'll start here: It's not Tom Brady or Michael Jordan or LeBron James. Why? Not enough people play either sport.
Although you could argue that Brady's individual/team success is a similar outlier to Messi's performance in soccer, the rest of the world doesn't play American football. See: the name. So compared to Messi, Brady is competing against a way smaller pool of athletes. The sport, in other words, is simply way less competitive than soccer is, so if we say that Messi is approximately 30% better than the next soccer player, then Brady (or any other football player) would have to be twice as good as Messi is compared to his peers -- or even better! -- for it to be similar. And he's not; no quarterback has ever been that good.
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It's a similar story with basketball. According to researchers in Australia, only about 5% have the genetic physical capabilities of becoming a professional basketball player. For soccer, the research found that 28% of the global population has the general physical blueprint required to become a pro.
Now it's true that basketball has become increasingly globalized: Over the past three years, more than half of the first-team All-NBA players were born outside the United States. The winners of the past four league MVPs were, too. So the competitive landscape of professional basketball is becoming more competitive by the year.
If you want to use that in your "LeBron or MJ" arguments, then feel free to go forth and post or yell at one of your uncles, but the sport still isn't close to soccer in terms of worldwide competitiveness.
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A recent survey of adults found that global soccer participation is currently double that of basketball, and that probably still undersells the gap in popularity between the two sports. No modern basketball player has ever been twice as good as Messi compared to his peers, and while perhaps some earlier players could make that argument, they were playing against much smaller and watered-down player pools.
Elsewhere, hockey's Wayne Gretzky is pretty easily the most dominant athlete across the so-called big four sports in North America. If he never scored a goal, he'd still maintain the all-time NHL record for points. Jaromir Jagr is second all-time in points (goals+assists) with 1,921, but Gretzky notched 1,963 assists alone. In a similar vein to Messi, he's also the leader in career goals scored with 894. The problem, of course, is that hockey participation is limited to either colder climates or areas with accessibility to indoor ice rinks. There are all kinds of structural limitations to involvement, and basically no one in Africa or Asia is playing ice hockey.
So, instead, I think I mostly land on this line of thinking, put forth a couple years ago by former FiveThirtyEight writer Benjamin Morris:
In reality, the GOAT basically comes down to the best track athlete vs the best tennis player vs the best soccer player, and that's it.
— Benjamin Morris (@skepticalsports) February 8, 2021
However, I'd eliminate tennis for two reasons: 1) Although some estimates put global participation rates much higher than some of the aforementioned sports, it's still well behind soccer because there's some kind of class element that limits participation (if you're wondering why we haven't mentioned golf, there you go) and 2) there have been a lot of fantastic tennis players, but there's a glut at the top and no major Gretzky- or Messi-like separation for the best player of the modern era -- whether it's Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, or Rafael Nadal -- or for the history of the sport.
I'd also suggest cricket as an option, too. As an American, I barely understand how the sport works, but by some estimates, it's the second-most popular sport in the world after soccer. And, by some statistical measures, the Australian cricketer Don Bradman is the most dominant athlete of all time. As Stephen Walters of the magazine "Significance" wrote:
The test career batting average of Australian cricketer Sir Donald Bradman of 99.94 runs per innings is one of the most famous and iconic sporting performance statistics in history. Bradman only played 52 test matches, with 80 innings, over a 20-year career from 1928 to 1948. Although many more test matches are played today, and many test cricketers have exceed Bradman's tally of test runs (6,996) and test centuries (29), Bradman's performance still stands out.
In the 137 years of test cricket, no one has a batting average remotely close to Bradman's. His career batting average is almost 39 runs higher than the next batsman (who have batted more than 20 times) and Bradman scored a century every 2.75 innings.
If you want to tell me that Don Bradman is a better athlete than Lionel Messi -- by the measures outlined in this piece -- then feel free. My instinct, though, is that he didn't play enough matches over his career and that he was competing at a time where some of the Asian countries like India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka either didn't have national teams yet, or weren't as competitive as they later became.
And so, that leaves us with one more name: Usain Bolt.
According to a 2017 study published in the journal Preventive Medicine titled "Global participation in sport and leisure-time physical activities: A systematic review and meta-analysis," running and soccer were quite clearly the two most popular athletic activities across the world. With soccer, you just need something you can kick; with running, you just need enough space to run.
Bolt is the only athlete to win gold in the 100- and 200-meter races in three consecutive Olympics. In 2008 in Beijing, he won both races in world-record times, making him the only person to ever hold both records at the same time. Amazingly, Bolt then re-set both records the following year at the World Championships in Berlin. And incredibly, Bolt still holds both records to this day. The 200-meter record he broke had stood for 12 years previously. But in the 100-meter, the record hadn't stood for more than 4½ years since Calvin Smith ran a 9.93 in 1983. Bolt's 9.58 has stood for 13 years and counting, and it's more than a full tenth of a second faster than the second-fastest 100 ever run: 9.69, which, of course, was also run by Bolt.
Almost everyone can run -- and Bolt was wildly and spectacularly better at running than any human being who has ever lived. In terms of pure athletic greatness, I'm not sure any male compares to that. But if there's one who can, it's not the guy who can throw a football 50 yards with precision accuracy or the shooting guard who can dunk from the free throw line.
No, it's the magical little playmaker who's about to play the final World Cup match of his career on Sunday.