Barcelona's Lionel Messi is one of the greatest sportspeople in history.

Even if the 32-year-old hung up his boots tomorrow, his achievements in the beautiful game are still worthy of a seat alongside Pele, Diego Maradona and Cristiano Ronaldo as a footballing icon.

But thankfully for us, Messi is still ploughing on into his thirties and winning a sixth Ballon d'Or trophy in 2019 suggests he's showing no signs of stopping.

The Argentine scored 51 goals in just 50 games during his last full season, beating Kylian Mbappe - a superstar over a decade his junior - to be crowned the continent's most prolific scorer.

And it's for that reason that we can expect Messi's vast expanses of records to keep growing.

Messi's endless greatness

Seldom does a week go by where Messi completes a game for Barcelona without making history and one of his greatest ever feats has been attracting interest on Twitter recently.

Twitter user @arduckling decided to play around with Messi's statistics during the peak of his career, spanning the 2008/09 and 2018/19 campaigns.

He calculated that Messi had scored 561 goals in 577 games during that decade for Barcelona, an average of 0.97 goals per game, and proceeded to compare it to some of Messi's contemporaries.

Twitter thread on Messi's 'absurd stat'

The moral of the story is that Messi's peak 10 years could rival his fellow European Golden Shoe winners when you add up all of their goals from their own greatest ever seasons.

In other words, Messi has been better than if you took the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez, Ronaldo Nazario and Thierry Henry in their primes and put them all together.

If you're feeling a little bit lost, then check out the full Twitter thread down below and try telling us that Messi isn't the greatest footballer of his era:

GIVEMESPORT's Kobe Tong says

I'm unashamed to say that I believe Messi is the greatest footballer in history.

What makes me so certain is that this Twitter thread highlights his goal-scoring ability in isolation, which is only one facet of his brilliance and he still comes out on top.

The likes of Robert Lewandowski and both Ronaldo's are legends for their out-and-out scoring, whereas Messi is going toe-to-toe with them while also being the world's best dribbler and passer.

It's for that reason that his abilities border on superhuman. Perhaps 51 isn't just his goal-scoring record from last season, but also the area from which he hails.