Lionel Messi Photo: VCG

Lionel Messi is currently the best footballer on the planet. The Argentine is the holder of the Ballon d'Or - his sixth - and he shows no signs of slowing down based on La Liga's return to action following its suspension for the novel coronavirus back in March.

Messi scored one and set two goals up in a 6-0 win over Real Mallorca to ease his league leading Barcelona side back into action and then was even more integral to their 2-0 win over struggling Leganes at Camp Nou.

To use the basketball terminology, Messi put Leganes defender Unai Bustinza "on a poster," with the image of the defender hanging onto the Barcelona star going viral on social media. 

The Leganes captain appears to have swapped association football for rugby football, employing the other code's rules for tackling with his arms wrapped around Messi's waist.

Other than that, the rest of Bustinza is off the ground as if he was tacking rugby star Jonah Lomu in full flight rather than a 5'7" Messi.

It proves just how devastating Messi still is in real life, something that oddly is not quite matched up on virtual versions of the virtuoso.

In the latest version of FIFA 20, the worldwide top-selling EA Sports version of the beautiful game, Messi has an overall rating of 94 out of 100, with a potential rating - the highest he can reach in the career version of the game - also 94, reflecting having already turned 32 by when the game was released.

Now even the most ardent of Messi fans cannot get too upset. It is the sixth time he has been given a 94 rating for the annual release, including each of the last two editions. More importantly for them, in FIFA 20, Cristiano Ronaldo has a 93 rating and Neymar's is 92, with those numbers the same for both overall and potential rankings for both players.

While Ronaldo has had 94 ratings in three versions of the game, Neymar has never bettered his current 92 and none of this comes close to when Messi had a potential rating of 97 in FIFA 13 and FIFA 14 before it dropped to 95 in FIFA 15.

Some will point out that there are actually 11 players in the game who, if you add up their overall numbers for every player statistic, have higher scores than Messi, topped by his Barcelona teammate Arturo Vidal.

However, this is merely a reflection on the reality that midfielders and defenders - Real Madrid pair Luka Modric and Marcello feature highly up the list - have higher scores across the board given their versatility and likelihood to be involved all over the pitch. Forwards, Messi and Ronaldo included, skew toward lower scores for defensive attributes by virtue of never defending.

In fact only PSG's Kylian Mbappe can overtake Messi in the overall stakes - he has a potential high of 95 - but still, what Messi does in La Liga every weekend or every few days now is more unrealistic than the video game version of him.

That has not always been the case, when games somehow make a player so much better than their real life version and it is not just in football. If anything it is even more pronounced in other sports.

Adriano - Pro Evolution Soccer 6

The Brazilian was as close to superhuman as any game attempting to simulate a real life sport could reasonably allow. The headline attribute was his 99 shot power rating but he was also preposterous in the air, had a 90 acceleration to go with his 88 top speed and balance of 98. In short it was like being a teenager playing against primary school players - and no less fun for it. Adriano was similarly ridiculous in the previous two editions of the game but was on the cover of PES 6 (along with John Terry, who was nowhere near as generously gifted). In real life, Adriano went off the boil after his father's death and failed to recapture his Inter Milan form anywhere else but for a generation of video gamers he is the best player they have ever seen.

Bo Jackson - Tecmo Super Bowl

Unstoppable is the word used to define Jackson in this digital version of American football and it has contributed to the legend of a player who only suited up four times in the NFL (with the good reason that he played nine times in the MLB). Such is the long-lasting resonance of the game, which came out in 1991, that there are still articles on Quora dedicated on how to stop him. The long and short of it is to injure him, if you can catch him that is.

Sunday Tiger Woods - Tiger Woods 2004

The "Sunday" version of Tiger Woods was the best playable character in what is considered to be the very best version of the game in the long running eponymous series. Sunday Tiger had maximum 110 ratings in all but two attributes - he had 105 for both spin and driving accuracy - but those sort of shortcomings were still higher than the best scores for all but a handful of all other characters' attributes. This meant like you could play the golf you saw the real life Tiger dish out on the final day of majors but with scores he could only dream of.

Pavel Bure - NHL 95

Earlier versions of the EA Sports NHL franchise had their star players, such as Jeremy Roenick, but Bure made the Vancouver Canucks surefire winners through his sheer speed. No one could get near him once he was on the puck and there was no answer to that but goals galore. He was not exactly bad in real life but nothing on his video game likeness.

Dell Curry - NBA Jam

OK, the game was not a simulation in any sense but still, Curry was the best at three-pointers in a game that was focused on dunking and once he lit up then he could hit them from half court and changed everything. If that sounds familiar it is because son Steph essentially did the same thing in real life with the Golden State Warriors.
Newspaper headline: Playing Games