Lionel Messi Tied A Sixteen-Year Record At Thirty-Eight, 2026
A disallowed goal in the fifth minute. That was how Lionel Messi’s night actually began in Kansas City, not with the hat trick everyone now remembers but with a composed finish into the bottom corner that the offside flag wiped away before it could count. He had to wait. Twelve more minutes, then two more goals after that, before the night belonged to him completely. Argentina beat Algeria 3-0 in their 2026 World Cup Group J opener on June 17, 2026, at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, and Messi scored all three, equaling Miroslav Klose’s record of sixteen World Cup goals along the way.
Messi scored in the 17th, 60th, and 76th minutes. Argentina’s win was never seriously threatened, finishing with 1.26 expected goals to Algeria’s 0.32, and Algeria managed just one shot on target the entire match. That is the scoreline and the shape of the game. What it does not capture is what it means for a 38-year-old to produce his first World Cup hat trick eight days before his birthday, with Klose’s record sitting right there waiting to be touched.
The first goal carried no signs of slowing down. Rodrigo de Paul, his Inter Miami teammate, found him just outside the box, and Messi drove a 20-yard effort into the roof of the net with his left foot. It was his fifth straight World Cup match with a goal, surpassing Hernan Crespo and Guillermo Stabile, who had managed four apiece. The number sits quietly next to his name now, the kind of record that gets mentioned once and then forgotten by everyone except the people who track these things for a living.
The second goal asked less of him and revealed something different about why he remains dangerous. Alexis Mac Allister struck from distance, Luca Zidane failed to smother it cleanly, and Messi simply stayed onside and alert long enough to react before anyone else could. A veteran’s instinct, not a young man’s burst. He side-footed the rebound past the sprawling goalkeeper from ten yards, an expected-goals-on-target value of 0.93 confirming that once the chance fell to him, there was barely a question of whether it would go in.
Algeria had chances of their own before that. Farès Chaibi nearly equalized in the 41st minute, and Houssem Aouar, on as a substitute, dragged a shot wide of an open net in the 69th after Riyad Mahrez squared the ball across the box. None of it mattered. Argentina’s defense held, and Messi kept finding ways back into the game.
The third goal was the one that made history, and the buildup told you everything about a player who still sees the full picture of a football pitch better than almost anyone alive. Messi dribbled through the center circle into Algeria’s half, poked the ball left to substitute Nico Gonzalez, then continued his run to receive it back. He needed only one more touch to set himself before curling a left-footed shot around a diving Zidane and into the net. The goal made him the oldest player to score a brace in a World Cup match, and the hat trick that completed it put him level with Klose atop the all-time list.
There was controversy mixed into the celebration, as there often is around Messi these days. He was denied what looked like a clear penalty after Rayan Ait-Nouri sent him tumbling in the box in the 66th minute, with referee Szymon Marciniak waving away the appeal. Television pundits spent the hours after the match arguing about whether Messi should have seen red earlier in the game, a debate that says as much about his enduring relevance as anything he did with the ball.
A standing ovation met him as he walked off in the 80th minute, replaced by Nico Paz, a player who was eleven years old when Messi first wore the Argentina shirt at a senior tournament. The image of that substitution, the crowd rising together inside Arrowhead Stadium, captured something that statistics alone cannot.
Kylian Mbappe sits one goal behind him on the all-time list after a brace of his own against Senegal, and Argentina’s remaining group games against Austria and Jordan offer Messi two more chances to move into outright first. Whether he takes them or not, the question that has followed him for two decades, the same one that gets asked every time he does something that should not be possible at his age, will keep circling. Is there a ceiling here. Nobody watching Kansas City on June 17 could honestly tell you where it is.