Lionel Messi, the man who has spent two decades making the impossible look routine, is doing it again. At 39 years old, he’s tied for the top scorer at the 2026 FIFA World Cup with six goals, level with France’s Kylian Mbappé. The kicker: Messi still has a game in hand.

One more goal and Messi stands alone atop the Golden Boot race.

The numbers behind the run

Messi’s six goals came entirely during the group stage. He opened with a hat-trick against Algeria, followed it with a brace against Austria, and added a single goal against Jordan for good measure.

That scoring burst made him the all-time leading goalscorer in men’s World Cup history, surpassing the record with his 17th career World Cup goal.

Mbappé, 12 years Messi’s junior, has matched the six-goal haul and added two assists. Those assists matter, because under Golden Boot tiebreaker rules, the player with more assists gets the nod when goal tallies are equal. So if both men finish the tournament on six goals, Mbappé would take the award.

That’s a big “if,” though. Messi has a round-of-32 match still to play, meaning he gets at least one more crack at pulling ahead before any tiebreakers come into the equation.

Behind the top two, Erling Haaland and Harry Kane are lurking with five goals each.