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#2 Most hat-tricks in UEFA Champions League
Because goalscoring is their forte, it is not a wonder that Messi and Ronaldo share another hat-trick record, this time in the UEFA Champions League. The Argentinean and the Portuguese have 8 hat-tricks in the UEFA Champions League at the moment and their journey to excellence has been worth drooling over. The only active players who come close to the dynamic duo are Robert Lewandowski, Mario Gomez and Luiz Adriano and all of them have 3 hat-tricks to their name!
Messi scored his first UEFA Champions League hat-trick in April 2010 against Arsenal and since then, he has scored hat-tricks against Viktoria Plzen, Bayer Leverkusen, Ajax, APOEL, Celtic, Manchester City, and PSV Eindhoven.
Ronaldo scored his first UEFA Champions League hat-trick as a Real Madrid player against Ajax in 2012. He went on to score hat-tricks against Galatasaray, Shakhtar Donetsk, Malmo FF, Wolfsburg, Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid, against whom he has 2 hat-tricks.
The Argentinean’s most recent hat-trick was against PSV Eindhoven in the 2018/19 season, while the Portuguese scored his last hat-trick against Atletico Madrid last season, which was also his first UEFA Champions League hat-trick as a Juventus player.
Incidentally, Ronaldo is the only player to have 3 hat-tricks in a single season, which he managed in the 2015/16 season for Real Madrid. On the other hand, Messi has managed 2 hat-tricks in a single season twice, in the 2011/12 season and the 16/17 season.
