The long battle between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo reached a new milestone on Saturday.
As Paris Saint-Germain won their 11th Ligue 1 title, Messi scored his 496th goal in Europe’s top five games. This broke Ronaldo’s record of 495 goals, which he had held since 2003.
The Argentine took advantage of Kylian Mbappé’s perfectly weighted cross and scored to give PSG a 1-0 lead over Strasbourg in the 59th minute.
Twenty minutes later, Kevin Gameiro tied the game for Strasbourg, but PSG still won the league title without much trouble.
Messi and PSG both broke records on the same day. PSG beat Saint-Etienne’s 10 Ligue 1 trophies to become the team with the most.
With the win, PSG also became the first team in the history of the league to be at the top of the table from the first round of games to the last. This streak goes all the way back to the third round of the 2021/22 season, which is 73 games.
But this latest win hides a growing rift between PSG and Messi. Earlier this month, Messi was suspended by the club for taking an unapproved trip to Saudi Arabia, which caused him to miss a training session.
Since then, the forward who won the World Cup has apologized to PSG and his teammates, saying he “sincerely thought” he had a day off. Some of his own fans booed him when he came back to the team, and a big group of PSG fans did the same in March, along with Neymar.
There were rumors earlier this month that Messi had decided to join a club in Saudi Arabia after his contract with PSG ends on June 30. However, Messi’s representatives said that those rumors were not true.
It has also been a tough season for PSG boss Christophe Galtier, whose team lost in the last 16 of the Champions League to Bayern Munich for the second time.
“I watched the last day of the season in the Bundesliga this afternoon, and it’s clear that it’s hard to win any league,” Galtier told the BBC afterward.
“This season, the winners in all of Europe’s leagues have had a lot of problems, so we know what this means. It’s a title, and even though we’re Paris Saint-Germain, we can’t think it’s normal to win.”
