I actually have a really good understanding of doping. I know ex olympian and ex national team and serie b athletes
El récord de goles de Gerd Müller duró 32 añosEl récord de goles de Ronaldo duró 8 añosEl récord de goles de Klose duró 12 añosEl récord de goles de Messi duró una semana— El Bávaro (@hugoderbayern) July 18, 2026
Messi with one of the worst ever performance in major finals and it's not the first time he did it (Copa America 2021 anyone).
Well, however a superbe, goat-level player he yas been in his prime, 39 yo Messi is a plausible 39 yo player.
Lionel Messi in 8 major tournaments finals with Argentina (WC 2014, 2022, 2026, Copa America 2007, 2015, 2016, 2021, 2024) : 2 goals scored (1 penalty) 0 assists provided 1 MOTM award Simply put his records in final with Argentina is Awful and there's no excuse about it, Di Maria is usually Argentina best player in final not Messi. If that was Ronaldo people would shitting on it till no end
I mean, if you go to the 2026 World Cup thread, you’ll find I thought Spain would win and for basically the exact reason they won (midfield dominance). I also said I thought Argentina might have a chance to pull it out for the exact reason they actually did somehow have a chance (Spain not finishing well). I would’ve liked it if Argentina won and if Messi had another great match, but it’s really no skin off my back that that didn’t happen. Both Messi and Argentina definitely did much better in this World Cup than I thought they would! And I like Spain as well, so I definitely don’t mind them winning. The whole run is just a very nice cherry on top for any Messi fan. After the 2022 WC I never even thought he’d play in the 2026 WC, let alone have a great tournament and make the finals.
Hey @lessthanjake now that Spain won and there's no clear standout player in the team, do you think Messi can win the ballon d'Or? I mean, he isn't "clearly" the best player of the tournament cause Mbappé also has a strong case for it. Imo both were the best although seemingly Rodri won the award which is again an exaggeration even though it's less than in 2024 as there were at least 5 Spanish players better than him but still, this tournament he's definitely on the mix for best Spanish players but not of the world cup overall. Even Bellingham were better than him this world cup and for me the best midfielder and best English player. Do you think Kane will win even though he had a good WC being the second best English player and a superhuman club season although not winning nothing Bayern wouldn't win without him like they did for the last 10 years or so? Maybe Mbappé who became world cup top scorer, champions league top scorer and LaLiga top scorer scoring over 50 goals in the season with deep runs despite winning no trophy?
They were quite generous with Messi's rating on Sofascore. No shots on goal, no assists, no key passes, zero defensive contribution: 7.2.
Bro he only scored 2 goals. The game is much more than goals. Messi had much more sideway passes and "touches" in the final third so he were better
I gave my thoughts on this before the final. If Argentina won, I thought Messi would get the Ballon D’or. They didn’t win, so he won’t. In the event of a Spain victory, I thought a Spain player could get it if they were the clear standout player, but at that point that would’ve required something great from Rodri or Yamal in the final. Otherwise, I said I thought it’d be Kane. The question is whether Rodri or Yamal were enough of a WC standout to win over Kane. I don’t think so. I think they’ll split votes and Kane will get the award. There’s maybe an outside chance that Yamal playing genuinely great at club level and winning the WC could be a good enough combination to win over Kane. I would vote for Kane though and I think he’s the person most likely to win.
So Kane gets the award for being Bundesliga top scorer playing for the best Bayern ever and winning nothing that Bayern wouldnt win without him (Bayern trashed teams like atalanta literally with him watching the game from the bench) while Mbappé were LaLiga, champions league and world cup top scorer while playing for a very inferior club that changed manager in the Middle of the season and in a much more competitive league? Make it make sense
I don’t think that that score for R9 is right, but it’s worth thinking about why it is that low, because 2 goal performances are basically always a lot higher than that. In this case, I think a lot of the reason is that he’s down as having 3 big chances missed. It’s also that he attempted 7 dribbles and failed all of them. There’s other little things as well that probably hurt a little, but those are probably the biggest. It’s possible SofaScore penalizes big chances missed too much, particularly if a player is a big part of creating the big chance for themselves. But basically, what the algorithm thinks is going on that game with R9 is that his team fed him such a huge number of chances that he wasn’t actually that clinical with those chances despite scoring two of them and he otherwise failed tons of dribbles and didn’t contribute much else. Hard to justify it being better than Messi in the game today of course, but this is where that rating is coming from I think.
I think it makes sense when you consider that Kane simply played significantly better for his club than Mbappe did. The fact that Bayern wins the Bundesliga almost every year doesn’t mean Kane didn’t play incredibly well. I should also note that Bayern didn’t just win the league—they scored more league goals than I’ve ever seen a team score in a top 5 league, despite only playing 34 games. I’m not sure any team in a top league has ever scored even close to that many goals per match. If they have, it must have been over half a century ago. Also FWIW since you mentioned Bayern easily winning a game against Atalanta without Kane, Real Madrid won a CL KO stage match again Man City 3-0 with Mbappe out. Big clubs can get good results with someone out. And Man City is a lot better than Atalanta.
There are levels. No one took Bundesliga numbers seriously before by the time Lewandowski was there for example. At world cup Kane were outscored by his midfielder Bellingham lmao meanwhile Olise just matched the all time record for most assists in a season. He even won Bundesliga player of the year and not Kane. If Kane has the most goals overall but Mbappé were top scorer of both world cup and UCL that means kane's extra goals were statpadding against minnows
Yes, that might be true, but they clearly inflated Messi's rating. No goals, no assists, no key passes, no defensive contribution, and only 30 passes with 74% accuracy (a low number, in 120 minutes of play). It's impossible to see anything above 6.5. Also, his rating for the entire World Cup, which was 8.79, is a bit off the charts for someone who barely participates in the match; something closer to 8.0 would make more sense. Bearing in mind that Pelé received a 9.1 rating in the 1970 final, where he scored 1 goal, gave 2 assists, had 5 key passes, and achieved 89% pass accuracy. Same rating as Pedri against Cape Verde. So it was said that Pedri got a high rating because of his pass volume, but Messi made very few passes today. Crazy. There seems to be human interference in their algorithm.
"Argentina were a disgrace today!" 😡Reflecting on the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina 👀 pic.twitter.com/bKlEeMpir0— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) July 19, 2026 This is the equivalent of Fox News calling MAGA a disgrace. They are a monstrosity within football and at this point anyone with functioning eyesight can see it.
I agree with your reasoning from start to finish, but wouldn’t rule out a surprise high finish from Messi. A lot of voters are narrative-driven, and there will be a lot of vote splitting from the UEFA bloc between Kane, the Spaniards (Yamal, Rodri, Fabian), the French, and even Kvara. With no standouts from CONMEBOL and given Messi’s reputation, he could be much higher than people think. CAF voters will decide - especially because they’ll have very few nominees this year I think (Hakimi and who else?)
I see you said many nonsense over the past few weeks regarding Sofascore ratings. 1. There is ZERO human interference with Sofascore ratings. 2. Retroactive ratings and current ratings are not equivalent because today, much more data is being measured and tracked, and goes into AI algorithm that makes ratings. Such as xG, xGoT, xThreat that relates to passing and dribbling, etc. 3. You and few others clearly dont understand how ratings are produced. Let me explain what AI machine learning algorithms such as Sofascore actually do. They are trained on 100 000s and possibly much more cases. What AI does is it looks at a massive training database that consists of essentially all possible permutations and combinations of player's performance in terms of measurable and trackable data points. Then AI is looking at patterns and correlations: If player A performs with dataset A, what is a probability of their team winning. By how much this dataset increases probability of his team winning a match. Machine learning algorithm looks at an incomprehensible amount of data to figure out that question. This is a training phase. Once the algorithm is trained, you cna use it. Then you give the algorithm a new dataset and based on that new dataset it makes a prediction. This prediction is outputed in a form of a rating that is scaled into a form of 1 to 10 rating scale that you see. Sofascore rating is not a basic Excel formula that counts a key pass as +0,2 or anythig like that. Having that said, actual rating is likely an output of machine learning prediction plus deterministic guardrails such as key pass being assigned +0,2 or similar.
A few things: 1. Bellingham only outscored Kane because of a silly third-place match that Kane didn’t play in and Bellingham did. And of course you’re also trying to downplay Kane scoring 6 WC goals in 7 matches. That’s really good regardless of how many goals someone else scored. He had a good WC campaign and scored some really key goals for England. 2. Kane does plenty besides scoring. For instance, in the match they lost, he was a primary architect of the goal they scored, with a great pass from deep. Kane isn’t just a goalscorer. He drops deep and does some really nice stuff from there, is a great passer, actually presses a lot (certainly more than Mbappe), etc. He is a striker that has a fantastic all around game AND has scored an insane amount of goals, including plenty of very important goals. 3. I think you’ll find that Mbappe was the CL top scorer because of goals against minnows. He had 2 goals in the CL KO stage and didn’t score in their three matches against big clubs in the CL league phase. And even with the WC he obviously didn’t score in the one real match (i.e. not the third-place quasi-friendly match) France played against a top-level team (though scoring against Spain was undeniably incredibly difficult). Ultimately, every big goalscorer scores a lot of their goals against relatively weak teams. 4. Olise did win player of the year in the Bundesliga. But Kane was amazing in the league too, and was also amazing in the CL and the German Cup. He was Bayern’s best player overall. Mbappe is not going to get the Ballon D’or. He had a good year but he literally didn’t win anything despite playing for Real Madrid and France. Kane not only had a better year individually, but also won some stuff (with his club team being historically great in attack).