Lionel Messi became the first player to score five goals in a single UEFA Champions League game with an exceptional performance against Bayer Leverkusen in March 2012.
Barça went into the second leg of this last-16 tie with a 3-1 lead, thanks in part to Messi himself, who grabbed the third away goal of a first-leg win in Germany. He was the star of the show in this 7-1 victory at Camp Nou, though.
This remains the only club game Messi has scored five goals in and they were part of his record-breaking 2011-12 season at Barcelona. That campaign saw him score a frightening 73 goals in 60 appearances – the most he’s scored in a single season at club level.
While he was the first player to score five in a game in the Champions League era (since 1992), he wasn’t the first to do so in the overall history of the European Cup. Here are the 10 players who scored five goals in a single European Cup match:
Owe Ohlsson – IFK Göteborg vs Linfield – 23 September 1959
Bent Löfqvist – B1913 vs Spora Luxembourg – 13 September 1961
Altafini – Milan vs Union Luxembourg – 12 September 1962
Raymond Crawford – Ipswich Town vs Floriana FC – 25 September 1962
Nikola Kotkov – Lokomotiv Sofia vs Malmö FF – 10 September 1964
Flórián Albert -Ferencváros vs Keflavík IF – 8 September 1965
Paul Van Himst – RSC Anderlecht vs Haka – 14 September 1966
Gerd Müller – Bayern Munich vs Omonia Nicosia – 24 September 1972
Claudio Sulser – Grasshopper Club Zürich vs Valletta FC – 13 September 1978
Søren Lerby – Ajax vs Omonia Nicosia – 24 October 1979
5 Goals: Luiz Adriano
BATE Borisov 0-7 Shakhtar Donetsk – 21 October 2014
Two and a half years after Messi’s five-goal haul against Bayer Leverkusen, Luiz Adriano became the second player to score five in a single Champions League match.
The Brazilian forward netted five times in Shakhtar Donetsk’s 7-0 away thrashing of BATE Borisov in the 2014-15 group stage, with four of them arriving before half-time.
The Shakhtar star also scored a hat-trick in the home meeting with the Belarusians, meaning his eight goals against BATE overall is the most ever scored by a player versus one team in a single UCL campaign.
