GOAT Athletes

Six trips to the NBA Finals with Chicago produced six titles and six Finals MVP awards for Jordan. His 30.1 career points per game is the highest average in league history, and he led the NBA in scoring ten times.

A record eight Ballons d'Or sit alongside the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the trophy Messi's case had been missing. His 91 goals in the 2012 calendar year remain the single-year record, and he won four Champions League titles at Barcelona.

Ali was the first boxer to win the world heavyweight title three separate times, beginning with the 1964 upset of Sonny Liston. He stopped George Foreman in the eighth round of the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 and closed his career at 56 wins and 5 losses.

Brady won seven Super Bowls in ten appearances, more than any single NFL franchise has won, and took five Super Bowl MVP awards. He retired holding the career records for passing yards (89,214) and touchdown passes (649).

Williams took 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any player in the Open era, plus four Olympic golds and 319 weeks at world No. 1. She twice held all four majors simultaneously, the run the tour nicknamed the Serena Slam.

Both sprint world records still belong to Bolt, 9.58 in the 100m and 19.19 in the 200m, each set at the 2009 Berlin World Championships. He swept the sprints and relay at three straight Olympics, finishing with eight golds after a teammate's doping ban voided the 2008 relay.

Twenty-eight Olympic medals, 23 of them gold, leave Phelps with more than double the gold count of any other Olympian. At Beijing 2008 he won all eight events he entered and set world records in seven of them, the largest single-Games haul on record.

Gretzky retired with 2,857 NHL points, and his 1,963 assists alone would still lead the all-time scoring list ahead of every other player's combined goals and assists. He took nine Hart Trophies, eight of them in Edmonton, plus four Stanley Cups there.

Woods holds 82 PGA Tour victories, tied with Sam Snead for the most in tour history, and 15 major titles, three behind Jack Nicklaus. Number 82 arrived at the 2019 Zozo Championship, the first official PGA Tour event staged in Japan.

James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA's career scoring leader in February 2023 and has since pushed the mark beyond 42,000 regular-season points. Four titles with three franchises, four MVPs and the all-time playoff scoring record reflect an unusually long prime.

He pulled baseball out of the dead-ball era almost by himself, out-homering entire teams in his biggest seasons after starting out as one of the league's best pitchers, and the honest caveat is that segregation kept the great Black pitchers of his day out of the league he dominated.

More Champions League titles than Messi and the men's international scoring record, which he was still adding to in 2024. He loses nearly every other head-to-head measure, fewer Ballons d'Or, no World Cup, and the move to Saudi football reads as chasing round numbers rather than trophies.

He owns the head-to-head against both Federer and Nadal and passed Serena's Open-era count when major number 24 arrived in 2023. What he never won was the crowd, and refusing the vaccine locked him out of two majors in 2022, prime chances he chose to give away.

Three World Cups as a player between 1958 and 1970, a mark nobody has matched, the first of them won at seventeen. The knock is that nearly the whole club career ran through Santos and the Brazilian league rather than Europe, so the club half of his record cannot be audited the way a European career can. The international half needs no audit.