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#4 First player to score more than one hat-trick in a Champions League season
Messi, alongside Ronaldo, holds the record for the most hat-tricks scored in the Champions League, with both of the players taking home the match-ball on eight occasions.
Though a lot of prolific strikers took part in the elite European club competition in the Champions League era and managed to score a hattrick or two, none of them had managed more than one in the same campaign since 1992.
That changed in the 2011-12 season when the Barcelona No.10 scored his second hat-trick for the 2011-12 campaign on 7 March 2012 against Bayer Leverkusen, having already humbled FC Viktoria Plzeň on 1 November 2011.
He also became the first player to score five goals in a single fixture that night as he managed a first-half hat-trick and led the charge in a 7-1 thrashing of the German side.
Had he not scored five goals in the quarter-finals, he would've lost this title to then Bayern Munich striker Mario Gómez, who scored a hat-trick for The Bavarians on 2 November 2011 and another four goals on 13 March 2012, just six days after Messi.
Subsequently, Luiz Adriano in 2014/15 and Ronaldo in 2015/16 would go on to replicate Messi's historic achievement. Ronaldo even went a step further and scored a third hat-trick in the 2015/16 campaign as he went on to score 16 goals that season, which is the second-best tally ever recorded for a campaign.
