Messi on track to challenge 68 year single tournament record - Odds favour him for Golden Boot

With the group stage coming to a close, the outlook for this year’s World Cup Golden Boot race is beginning to take shape. The deeper a team goes, the more opportunities its star players will have to add to their goal tally, making team success a major factor in how the top goalscorer market plays out.

Betting sites, such as BetVictor, currently have Lionel Messi as the favourite to score to the most goals this World Cup. BetVictor has Messi to win with odds of +175, giving him an implied probability of 36.4%.

Other leading Golden Boot contenders include Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Harry Kane, and Cristiano Ronaldo. With several of these players representing teams expected to advance deep into the knockout stage, this market could remain highly competitive even with Messi currently leading the way.

Lionel Messi currently leads the World Cup Golden Boot race with five goals, putting him just ahead of Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, who both sit on four.

What makes Messi’s start even more impressive is how quickly he has reached that stat line. Through just two group stage matches, he has scored all five of Argentina’s goals, with one final group match against Jordan still to come before the knockout stage.

Messi also made history in Argentina’s last match against Austria, scoring twice and leading to 18 career World Cup goals as he became the tournament’s all-time leading scorer.

With the 2026 World Cup’s expanded format creating more matches and more scoring opportunities than previous tournaments, it is now fair to wonder whether Messi can chase down one of football’s longest standing records. 

Just Fontaine still holds the single-tournament record with 13 goals from the 1958 World Cup, meaning Messi would need nine more goals to break it. At this stage, that remains a massive ask, but given his start, it's beginning to feel like a possibility.

Once the knockout stage begins, Argentina could have as many as five more matches if they go all the way to the final and lift the trophy. Messi’s chance of breaking Just Fontaine’s 68-year-old single tournament scoring record will depend heavily on how deep Argentina can go.

France and England are currently viewed as the leading favourites to reach the World Cup final, while Argentina and Spain remain close behind in current projections. Argentina is still considered one of the bigger threats in this year’s tournament, but the knockout stage should provide a much clearer test of how strong they really are. 

So far, Argentina has not had to face the same level of opposition it could encounter later in the tournament. Once the knockout bracket is set, matchups can become much less predictable, and one difficult draw can quickly change the outlook for any contender.

Even so, it isn't absurd to think Argentina can at least reach the quarter-finals. Doing so would give Messi three more matches after the group stage to add to his goal tally. 

If Argentina go even deeper, his pursuit of Fontaine’s record could become one of the biggest individual storylines of the tournament.