Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé have met four times as opponents, and those four matches include a World Cup knockout classic, a Champions League hat-trick at the Camp Nou, and the greatest final ever played. In between, they spent two seasons as teammates in Paris, winning titles together while the soccer world wondered how the arrangement didn’t combust. And now the 2026 bracket has placed them in opposite halves, meaning meeting number five can happen in exactly one place: the World Cup final at MetLife on July 19, with the all-time scoring record, Messi 21, Mbappé 20, live between them.
This is the complete history of soccer’s defining current rivalry: every meeting, the teammate years, and the numbers as they stand one week from a possible collision.
The chart below covers every head-to-head match, the PSG chapter, the all-time race, and the path to July 19. Take a look, then we’ll break it all down.
Four Matches, Zero Duds
Most great rivalries accumulate forgettable chapters; this one has produced four matches and four classics. The 2018 round of 16 was Mbappé’s global debut as a phenomenon, a 19-year-old sprinting from his own half to win a penalty, then scoring twice in nine minutes of a 4-3 win over a Messi side that had thrown everything back at France, still routinely called the best knockout match of its decade until the two of them topped it. The 2021 Champions League tie was the succession drama made literal: Mbappé’s hat-trick in a 4-1 win at the Camp Nou, celebrated on the pitch Messi had owned for fifteen years, followed by a return leg where Messi answered with one of his greatest goals and then, cruelly, pushed a penalty save-height at Keylor Navas before halftime with the tie alive. And the 2022 final needs no introduction as the consensus greatest match ever played: Messi scoring twice, Mbappé responding with the second final hat-trick in history plus a converted shootout kick, ten combined goal involvements of pure will, resolved only by Emiliano Martínez’s glove. Every format they’ve met in, they’ve broken. There is exactly one format left.
The Strangest Rivalry in Sports
What separates Messi-Mbappé from Messi-Ronaldo, the rivalry it succeeded, is that its principals spent two years sharing a dressing room in the middle of it. Messi’s 2021 Barcelona collapse deposited him at PSG alongside Mbappé and Neymar in the most talent-dense forward line ever assembled, and the pair combined for two league titles, endless highlight-reel link-ups, and one famously unfulfilled Champions League quest, all while privately preparing to oppose each other at Qatar 2022. The final they then contested against each other, followed 36 days later by a return to the same training ground, remains the most surreal sequence in modern sports; teammates who had just traded five goals in a World Cup final greeting each other at the coffee machine. That history is why the rivalry runs on reverence rather than needle, they are each other’s most credible admirers, and it’s also why a July 19 meeting would carry a unique intimacy: no two players contesting a final have ever known each other’s games so completely. The bracket has done its part, opposite halves, no possible meeting before the last match, the all-time record sitting at 21-20 between them, and the Golden Boot tied. Football has never scheduled a better hypothetical. Two semifinals stand between it and reality.
Final Word
Messi vs. Mbappé, the complete history: four meetings, all classics, France’s 4-3 in 2018, Mbappé’s Camp Nou hat-trick and Messi’s thunderbolt in the 2021 Champions League tie, and the 3-3 masterpiece of the 2022 final that Argentina won on penalties; two seasons as PSG teammates in between, with two titles and one surreal post-final reunion; and now a 2026 tournament where they’ve combined for 16 goals, sit 21-20 in the all-time World Cup scoring race, share the Golden Boot lead at 8, and occupy opposite halves of a bracket whose only possible meeting point is the final at MetLife on July 19. Meeting five would be the biggest match ever played. This page is ready either way.
The record between them is tracked in most World Cup goals ever, the chaser’s ledger is in Mbappé’s World Cup goals, and the stage is set in the 2026 World Cup final guide.