Messi overtakes the World Cup scoring record, and the question of what comes next

Lionel Messi turned 39 on 24 June 2026 and, somewhere between the candles and the midnight kickoffs across three time zones, added another line to the longest résumé in football. FIFA's official tournament channel logged "another day, another FIFA World Cup record broken" on Day 13 of the 2026 tournament, a milestone cleared in the small hours of a Wednesday that the federation's own feed flagged without naming. The Athletic's live coverage and the BBC's 14:39 BST feature on Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo confirm what that phrasing meant in plain English: with his next goal, Messi passes Miroslav Klose and stands alone at the top of the all-time World Cup scoring chart.

The shape of the record is, for once, less interesting than the conversation it has restarted about how to read these things in an expanded tournament. Klose's 16 goals came across four editions of a 32-team, 64-match World Cup, the format the rest of football grew up watching. Messi's have come across five editions that include a 48-team, 104-game version, the one that opened in North America on 11 June. The Golden Boot race through the group stage is on a tear by any historical measure; the Guardian's tactical column from 15:56 BST on 24 June describes a tournament "shaping up to be the most prolific since 1970", with Harry Kane scenting another Golden Boot, Kylian Mbappé closing fast and a generation of younger finishers, from Bosnia's 18-year-old Kerim Alajbegović to Haiti's Wilson Isidor, getting in on the act. The pace has scrambled the baselines against which any individual number now has to be measured.

Klose's number, Messi's calendar

Klose's 16 goals were a career-defining artefact: two in 2002, five in 2006, four in 2010, two in 2014 and two more in his farewell 2016 campaign, most of them against opponents who had been given the same number of matches and the same length of recovery as he had. Messi's chase has been different in kind. He opened his World Cup account in 2006 with one goal against Serbia and Montenegro, added one more in South Africa four years later, four in Brazil, including the extra-time winner in the final against Germany, four in Russia, and the rest have arrived across Qatar 2022 and the group stage of this tournament. The structure of the record, in other words, is a 20-year accumulation across two distinct eras of the competition: the old 32-team model that Klose owned outright, and the 48-team model that gives him, and every contemporary striker, more touches, more minutes, more chances.

It is the kind of asterisk that gets argued over in pubs and on podcasts, but rarely inside the broadcast box. The match-going viewer is not asked to do the math. They are asked to celebrate.

What the broadcast skips

The expanded format was sold as a development story, with nine more places for Africa, three more for Asia, two more for the Concacaf region and one intercontinental playoff slot. The Guardian's live blog for Morocco v Haiti made the structural point explicitly: "No region benefited as much from the expansion of the World Cup as Africa." That same expansion is the reason the all-time scoring chart now resets its denominator. There are 104 matches in this tournament, not 64. There are roughly 1,200 players in the squad lists, not 736. Every record set between now and 19 July will be set against a wider population of scorers, more minutes of football, and more games between minnows and giants in which the giants tend to feast.

This is not a small footnote. It is the difference between a number and a meaning. Klose's 16 is what Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé and Kane are chasing on the screens. The number itself is unchanged. What changed, between 2018 and 2026, is the scaffolding around it.

Ronaldo is still here, too

If Messi's milestone has a co-author, it is the man who turns 41 in February. The BBC's feature on the two of them, timed to Messi's birthday, frames them as the last working artefacts of a generation that began with a teenage Ronaldo at Manchester United and a teenage Messi breaking through at Barcelona. The pair have shared the international game's marquee billing for so long that a World Cup without both of them in the conversation is hard to picture. Ronaldo is in this tournament for what is widely expected to be the last time, and his presence still bends the calendar: Transfermarkt's Saudi correspondent Ben Jacobs reported on 24 June that Al-Nasr and Cristiano Ronaldo are still negotiating with Roberto Martinez over the head coach role for next season, with both sides waiting on the World Cup. The future of a club, in other words, is being sequenced around the last competitive windows of a player's national-team career.

That is the strange shape of this tournament for the two of them. Every match is an audition; every goal rewrites a record; every round of fixtures compresses another layer of legacy into a smaller space. Messi has his name at the top of the scoring chart on his 39th birthday. Ronaldo has Martinez on a conference call. Both of them, still.

The question of what comes next

The honest version of the question is two questions, stacked. The first is technical: what does this record look like when a 48-team World Cup runs again in 2030, with the same six matches minimum for every group-stage survivor and the same expanded knockout bracket? The all-time chart is being rewritten in a tournament whose own denominator is in flux, and there is no settled way yet to compare a number earned across 32-team editions with one earned across 48-team editions. The second is generational: Mbappé is 27, Haaland is not here, Vinícius Júnior is 25 and Endrick is 19. The next cycle will be theirs.

For now, the federation's own feed offers the cleanest version of the moment: another day, another record. Messi has the goals. The tournament has the goals. The architecture underneath both is quietly shifting, and the next milestone will land on a surface that looks a little different again.

Sources

• BBC Sport: As Messi turns 39, how he and Ronaldo keep breaking records, 2026-06-24T14:39
• The Guardian: Red-hot strikers, errors and smart subs, why the 2026 World Cup is a goal-fest, 2026-06-24T15:56
• The Guardian: Morocco v Haiti, World Cup 2026 live, 2026-06-24T22:58
• FIFA Telegram channel: Day 13 record broken, 2026-06-24T14:23
• The Athletic Telegram: Superior Player Of The Match vote, 2026-06-24T23:24
• Transfermarkt Telegram (via Ben Jacobs): Ronaldo–Martinez–Al-Nasr update, 2026-06-24T16:05
• BBC Sport: Alajbegovic scores stunning opener for Bosnia, 2026-06-24T20:58
• BBC Sport: Isidor hits incredible second for Haiti, 2026-06-24T23:38
• Polymarket World Cup markets, 2026-06-24

Desk note: Monexus treated this as a confirmed milestone rather than a developing story, led with the FIFA-issued figure and the timestamp at which it cleared, and flagged the structural caveat, the expanded 2026 format, that most match broadcasts will not raise.