List of players who play like Messi: the top 5

Lionel Messi is unique and it is very unlikely that we will ever see a player as incredible as him again, but even so, the consulting firm DribLab conducted a study to try to find out which are the most "similar" current players to the Barcelona star.

The company conducted its study on a base of 71,600 players, 2,300 teams and 73,000 matches to find the most similar to Lionel Messi from the statistics.

The analysis was based on these 12 points:

Who is the player most similar to Messi?

Eden Hazard

Eden Hazard is the player "most similar" to Messi. The Real Madrid player achieved a "similarity" of 92.7% and surpassed Messi in three aspects: fewer lost balls, greater pressure during the start and completed dribbles.

Mbappé (91.3%)

Kun Agüero (91.1%)

Di María (90.5%)  

Neymar (89.5%)

The method used for this analysis is known as factor analysis. Essentially, it allows someone to start with several “base-level” metrics – shots, dribbles, tackles – and it looks to explain the variance found in these numbers.

Using the relationships between the different metrics, it “simplifies” the data into fewer categories known as factors, that explain as much of the variance as possible.

The leagues included in this process were the first divisions of the top 20 nations in the UEFA club coefficient rankings for 2019/20, the second divisions of the top five leagues (Spain, England, Germany, Italy, and France), and the first divisions of the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, and Chile.