Barcelona's Lionel Messi is undoubtedly the best free-kick taker in the world.
It's staggering to think that the six-time Ballon d'Or winner has scored 19 goals from free-kicks in the last three seasons alone and he's hot on Cristiano Ronaldo's heels with 51 strikes overall.
Whether or not he'll be able to overtake Juninho's world record of 77 remains to be seen, but we can all agree that Messi is the best from a dead-ball when it comes to the last five years.
Bearing that in mind, you'd like to think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate his proficiency from free-kicks, but that hasn't stopped YouTuber 'ChrisMD' from trying.
You might be familiar with the content creator - who boasted 4.9 million subscribers - for his recent cat/goalkeeper video and he's also pretty decent for an amateur footballer.
Trying to match Messi
The Jersey-based YouTuber recently trained for months to try and sprint like Kylian Mbappe and now he's spent hours upon hours taking free-kicks until he 'Became Better Than Messi'.
Look... we hear your skepticism, we really do and there's never going to be a perfect way of scientifically recreating real-game scenarios, but credit to 'ChrisMD' for doing his level best.
The mission was to match Messi's last 50 free-kicks for average shot accuracy, average shot time and number of block shots across the same seven areas of the pitch that the Barca star took them.
YouTuber vs The GOAT
He chalked off any goals that narrowly passed over his mannequins as shots that would be blocked by the wall in real life and strived to shoot with the same speed in order to account for the obvious discrepancy in goalkeeping quality.
Is there 90,000 fans on the edge of their seats? Yeh, no, of course not, but you try replicating it any better in your own local park or sending Jan Oblak a DM on Instagram asking him to stand in goal.
Ranting aside, though, you can check out the full video down below and keep scrolling for our breakdown of how 'ChrisMD' got on at trying to match Messi's magic.
So... did he succeed? After nine days and 450 efforts, the answer is: yes.
'ChrisMD' averaged a miss distance of 1.93 yards, which is better than Messi's 2.02, while also having just 10 shots blocked compared to the Argentine's 13 and narrowly beating the pro's shot time by 0.01 seconds.
In other words, after more than a week of trying over and over again, the YouTuber managed to shoot more accurately than Messi with fewer blocks and quicker shots.
So, there you have it, you just need to spend nine days trying and you'll be the best free-kick taker in the world. Cheers, that's all, see you later... yeh, no.
Like we've said, there's only so much of the highest level of football that you can recreate down the park and it doesn't mean that Barcelona should put in a cheeky transfer offer.
But even if we do accept the result for what it is, let it show that Messi's brilliance is such that it takes an amateur player nine times as long to achieve his gold standard in just one aspect of his game. Simply the greatest.
