Lionel Messi is Worse Than the Average Penalty-Taker – Do Argentina Need to Make a Change?

Lionel Messi is having a sensational World Cup, but his penalties have left a lot to be desired. Should Argentina look at other options from the spot?

Who are we to doubt Lionel Messi?

With every game that passes at the 2026 World Cup, the Argentine gives further credence to the argument he is the greatest player ever by breaking record after record on the biggest stage of all.

Tuesday’s sensational late comeback in their round-of-16 win over Egypt was no different.

Messi was, predictably, integral. He set up one goal and then scored another to break his own record as the oldest player to score and assist in a World Cup game. This was the fifth time he’d done so, with no other player on record having done so more than three times (since 1966).

He became the first player in World Cup history to score in six consecutive knockout matches. He moved clear at the top of the World Cup assists leaderboard, with nine, now one clear of Diego Maradona. He set a new record for goals scored at a single World Cup by a player aged over 30, breaking his own previous record.

Once again, Messi proved his worth. Without him, Argentina’s title defence may well have ended prematurely.  

And yet, despite his continued brilliance and the relentlessness with which he still proves a match-winner on the biggest stage at the age of 39, one glaring doubt remains.

Just five minutes after his side had gone a goal down, Nicolás Tagliafico was tripped in the box by Haissem Hassan. It was the perfect opportunity for the reigning champions to quash any idea of an upset before it really got going.

But Messi stepped up and placed his penalty at a saveable height not even halfway between the middle of the goal and the post, meaning all that goalkeeper Mostafa Shobeir had to do was go the right way. Once he’d done that, keeping the penalty out was a formality.

Ultimately, Messi’s latest spot-kick failure didn’t hurt Argentina, but it very nearly did. Egypt had a goal disallowed for a foul – a decision that has been roundly viewed since as extremely harsh – at 1-0 up. They did then get a second (which could have been a third), meaning Argentina were two goals down as late as the 79th minute before wrestling their way back into the tie and mounting the most remarkable of comebacks.

Before Cristian Romero’s goal to make it 2-1, the Opta supercomputer gave Argentina just a 0.6% chance of winning inside 90 minutes. It was the latest any team has ever been 2+ goals down in a World Cup game and come back to win without going to extra-time.

That was Messi’s second penalty failure of this World Cup, after his miss against Austria in the group stage. He is the first player in the history of the World Cup to miss more than one spot-kick at the same tournament (excluding shootouts), and he still has up to three more games to go in 2026. He has missed more penalties (four) than any other player in the competition’s history, scoring just 50% of his attempts.

It’s impossible not to wonder how it can be that a player who has scored goals for fun at every level he has played at for the past two decades, a footballer arguably unrivalled at any stage in the history of football, cannot do the simplest job of all? Why can’t Lionel Messi score penalties?

Okay, that might be a little hyperbolic. Messi can score penalties. He has scored plenty of them over the years, many of them in the most pressured situations going. He was successful from the spot in the 2022 World Cup final, for example, and while at Barcelona, he scored six from six attempts in Clásicos against Real Madrid.

But there have also been quite a few high-profile failures from 12 yards, too, and they, fairly understandably given the context of Messi’s otherwise near-perfect ability and technique, stick out in the memory.

He hit the bar with a penalty as Barcelona crashed out of the 2011-12 Champions League semi-final against Chelsea. He saw spot-kicks saved in consecutive seasons in the round of 16 in 2020-21 and then 2021-22. The first was while he was still at Barcelona, when PSG’s Keylor Navas saved from him, then a year later, after he’d moved to PSG, Real Madrid’s Thibaut Courtois kept him out. On both occasions, his side exited the competition at that stage.

But as well as the high-profile individual misses, Messi’s overall spot-kick numbers are deeply underwhelming.

In competitions analysed in detail by Opta, the eight-time Ballon d’Or winner has taken 148 penalties for Barcelona, PSG, Inter Miami and Argentina. He has scored with 114 of those, giving him a conversion rate of 77.0%.

That might not sound that bad, but some context can make clear just how poor his record really is.

Based on nearly one million shots from 40 competitions between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the likelihood of a penalty being scored is around 79%. The expected goals value of a penalty is, accordingly, 0.79 xG.

That means that over the course of his glittering, trophy-filled career, Messi has scored penalties at a worse rate than the average penalty taker would have. It’s an incredible blind spot on his otherwise impeccable CV.

At World Cups, he has scored four penalties from 6.31 xG, an underperformance of 2.31. His 17 non-penalty goals, meanwhile, have come from just 13.1 xG, an overperformance of 3.9.

In short, he is an elite goalscorer and finisher in normal play, but something happens to him when it comes to stepping up from 12 yards. There’s no questioning his value to this team, but there is a legitimate argument that Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni should consider taking penalty-taking duties off his star man.

It’s not as if he’s lacking other options, either. Looking at members of Argentina’s current squad while playing in competitive matches for teams in Europe’s top five leagues, Major League Soccer, the Argentinian top flight or for the national side, eight have taken at least 10 penalties. Of those, only two have a worse conversion rate than Messi: Lautaro Martínez (66.7%), who happens to be the only Argentine who has scored a penalty at the 2026 World Cup, and Atlético Madrid’s Thiago Almada (64.3%). There are several viable options who Scaloni could turn to.

Leandro Paredes (92.9%), Alexis Mac Allister, Enzo Fernández (both 91.7%) and Julián Alvarez (89.5%) all have genuine claims to be Argentina’s best penalty taker, each having scored around nine in every 10 of their attempts. All four of them started against Egypt and were on the pitch to see Messi’s latest miss up close. Mac Allister is the only outfielder to have played more minutes than Messi for Argentina at this World Cup, so he could be expected to be on the pitch at any given time just as much as Messi.

There is an argument the pressure of taking a penalty in the World Cup would mean a pressure that none of those players are accustomed to; Messi has taken 32 penalties for his country, while every other member of the squad combined have taken just seven. Paredes is the only one of the four players mentioned above who has ever taken a spot-kick for Argentina, and he missed one of his three.

What’s more, being handed spot-kick duties at this tournament would mean replacing Messi in front of the world, which would only add to the scrutiny levels. Perhaps none of those players are cut out for that sort of pressure, none of them having taken anything like the quantity of penalties that Messi has.

But given that each of their records from the penalty spot for their clubs is significantly better, and Messi’s worse-than-average spot-kick ability – and the possibility that he is struggling with the mental challenge of taking a penalty at this World Cup – there is a conversation to be had on the topic.

Against both Austria and Egypt, Messi bailed his team out. He has the ability to do that, and he might well keep on doing it all the way to the 2026 final and then to a second successive World Cup triumph.

But as Argentina go deeper in the competition and come up against stronger teams, second chances may prove harder to come by. They may not be able to afford another missed spot-kick, and that could mean taking arguably the greatest player ever off penalty duties.

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