Who has the Most Assists in Football History

As the most popular sport around the globe, football created some of the most popular athletes globally. To quantify it today, it’s enough to say that the biggest stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have over 500 million and over 670 million followers each, respectively.

Being an exceptional goal scorer is an amazing feat, but being the best team player is far more important in football. That’s why being a playmaker and assisting others score is even more important in this team sport. However, measuring the number of assists is challenging, especially if you go back into history.

Plus, what constitutes an assist? If the ball hits the goal post and bounces back to the other player, is it an assist? It’s hard to quantify it, but ever since modern tracking data was implemented in the 2000s, it’s become an important stat that says a lot about the player.

This article dives into the details of the top playmakers with the most assists in football history. Before we get to the raw data, let’s first explain what counts as an assist.

How Are Assists Officially Counted?

There are some rules that most generally apply when it comes to assist counting. Before we list them, it’s important to understand that if you’re betting, every individual sportsbook has different rules about how assists are counted. So if you want to use a no verification casino no deposit bonus to bet on the number of assists that a player will earn in the game, check the rules of placing such bets and what counts as an assist. However, some general rules of what is considered an assist are the following:

• Final pass – This is the most obvious scenario. Whoever is the last person to pass the ball to the scorer earns an assist.
• Intentionality – There has to be an intention to pass the ball. If it’s by accident, it will not count as a pass.
• Rebounds – If the ball is blocked or saved but bounces back and a player scores, the person who previously tried to score is credited with the assist.
• Deflections – If a player from the opposing team touches the ball during a pass, it will still be credited as an assist. 
• Own goals – Scoring an own goal is ineligible to be counted as an assist.

The counting process was standardized with Opta. The first games tracked by Opta were in the Premier League in 1997. However, it took years before it became a standard and turned into a standard for tracking assists. Its official tracking started in 2002 and 2003.

This detailed tracking created a new strict standard, which created disputes for numerous historical records before the tracking process started. That’s normal because previous records were based on reconstructed games where the sources were often subjective. Let’s explore who has the most assists in football history.

Most Assists in Football History

The table below includes all of the information about players with most assists in football history.

Player	Total Official Assists*	Club Assists	International Assists	Matches Played	Assist per Game	Active/Retired
Lionel Messi	407 (Opta)	346 (Opta)	61 (Opta)	1,138 (Opta)	0.35 (Opta)	Active
Cristiano Ronaldo	260 (Opta)	223 (Opta)	37 (Opta)	1,310 (Opta)	0.19 (Opta)	Active
Luis Suárez	338 (Estimation)	279 (Transfermarkt)	39 (Estimation)	1,005 (Transfermarkt)	0.33	Active
Ángel Di María	317 (Transfermarkt)	282 (Transfermarkt)	35 (Transfermarkt)	987 (Transfermarkt)	0.32	Active
Thomas Müller	326 (Transfermarkt)	285 (Transfermarkt)	41 (Transfermarkt)	990 (Transfermarkt)	0.33	Active
Kevin De Bruyne	316 (Transfermarkt)	263 (Transfermarkt)	53 (Transfermarkt)	777 (Transfermarkt)	0.38	Active
Ryan Giggs	282 (Transfermarkt)	274 (Transfermarkt)	8 (Transfermarkt)	1031 (Transfermarkt)	0.27	Retired
Mesut Özil	259 (Transfermarkt)	219 (Transfermarkt)	40 (Transfermarkt)	737 (Transfermarkt)	0.35	Retired
Xavi Hernández	241 (Transfermarkt)	217 (Transfermarkt)	24 (Transfermarkt)	1,072 (Transfermarkt)	0.22	Retired

All the numbers in the table are officially stated by Opta and the Transfermarkt website. You can find the source of the information stated in the brackets.

Lionel Messi is without a doubt the player with the most assists in football history. That’s not a surprise because his talent, combined with the psychology behind Barcelona as a club, made him an unstoppable playmaker. As you see in the table above, several of the most assists in football history top 10 players happen to be Barcelona players. The strategy of the team is to pass the ball to each other as much as possible, which has resulted in several players being at the top when it comes to assists.

Messi’s style of play also translated to his national appearances, where he also holds the record for the player with most assists in football history.

Club and International Records

The total number of assists consists of two different numbers. One is the club number, and the other one is the number of appearances for the national team. As expected, the number of club assists is always bigger because of the nature of the competition. A player appears in the league more often. Here’s the schedule for the Premier League, which counts 380 fixtures, resulting in more chances to get an assist attributed to them. Additionally, there are more tournaments that involve multiple teams from different leagues, which add more appearances and more chances to score goals and earn assists.

On the contrary, some players truly shine with their national teams and score plenty of goals when they show up with them. Kevin De Bruyne is a great example as a player who has a great ratio between club and international assists. In this regard, he is the second on the list of the most assists in football history top players, behind only Lionel Messi.

Final Answer

Lionel Messi is the definitive answer to the question of who has the most assists in football history. His talent, mixed with the Barcelona football school, makes him an unstoppable force in the field even today. 

His record is clear because all his career information was tracked by Opta. It seems that he will remain at the top of players with most assists in football history for quite some time. The only way that someone might dethrone him in the future is to have as powerful a challenger as he did during his peak, Cristiano Ronaldo.

Until then, he will remain on the throne of the best-performing athletes in the world.