Well, this page has been pinged for being too long, and this page was already split once before from Lionel Messi's main page. His career is full of significant milestones season by season, both club and internationally, and it isn't over yet, so more details will be added with each year. Therefore naturally I think the best idea would be to split this page in two, splitting the international section to its own page called International career of Lionel Messi and moving this page title to Club career of Lionel Messi Flowerkiller1692 (talk) 21:41, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging @AFC Vixen, Jtbobwaysf, GiantSnowman, Jtbobwaysf, Stevie fae Scotland, AirshipJungleman29, Ideophagous, Mazewaxie, MatthewNewHouse, 750h+, Sepguilherme, Guyrichtheman, and Nampa DC: as participants in the previous vote. Also going to extend conversation for another week Flowerkiller1692 (talk) 01:41, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support – as the page is already broken into such sections, a split on this distinction makes total sense to me. C679 08:15, 1 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support – Makes sense. ⋆｡˚꒰ঌ Clara A. Djalim ໒꒱˚｡⋆ 13:37, 2 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I can see where it's coming from but this feels like the wrong solution. I know initially the request to split into two was opposed. I find it very odd how much detail is needed to go into this article. Other sports greats like Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, either Lebron James, or Michael Jordan don't get their careers split from the main article at all. I understand Messi is a current top player in the biggest sport in the world so he has much more content about him, but this article has three paragraphs about Messi retiring from International play for a week in 2018. I think it would do better to trim the fat of the article first. MatthewNewHouse (talk) 02:13, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If you look at Tom Brady's page, virtually every one of his season subsections are just as detailed as Messi's seasons for his club alone. And the number of competitions that footballers/soccer players vast outnumbers American sports, whose sections primarily focus on the playoffs. This is where the level of detail primarily comes from.

  Even taking out/trimming the retirement section, each of the competitions sections talk about the significance of what they each meant for Messi's career, as well as his contributions in each competition.

  A better comparison is Roger Federer - EACH of his seasons have their own pages primarily due to the different competitions he had to experience each year. Flowerkiller1692 (talk) 02:25, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And I meant to say even if you were to take out/trimming the Retirement section, it still would be over the word count. There have been matches that have been added in the article, but have been removed because Messi had no individual importance to said added matches. So I'd say fat is already being trimmed and yet the article is still a sizable length. Flowerkiller1692 (talk) 02:53, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  My point wasn't that the retirement section is holding this article back, it's that this article goes into so much depth for things that don't require it and I was using that as an example. as AirshipJungleman29 points out below, there is so much detail for things that we don't need. For example, Connor McDavid scored the overtime winner for Canada vs USA in the final of the first best on best hockey tournament in a decade, and in his article it's written as:

  Recording three goals, including the game- and tournament-winning goal in the final matchup against Team USA

  That's as much detail as the biggest international hockey goal in a decade gets. Messi gets small paragraphs about games he lost. I realize hockey is a smaller sport than Soccer but we don't need to know how far a goal was scored (Unless it's statistically relevant.) Does this mean McDavid's should have a little more detail given for that moment? Sure, but this is for a regular season streak of games pulled from the article:

  he set-up Munir's goal in a 2–0 away win over Sevilla in the first leg on 14 August, and subsequently scored in a 3–0 win in the return leg on 17 August. Three days later, he scored two goals as Barcelona won 6–2 against Real Betis at home in the opening game of the 2016–17 La Liga season.

  We don't need to mention every single game he scored or assisted in. He's a forward, it's his job to score and create goals. He has over 600, we don't need to mention an assist in a 2016 non playoff game. This article is to discuss his career in more depth yes but this is clearly too much. MatthewNewHouse (talk) 18:16, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Stop pinging me, I'm not gonna contribute this. Guyrichtheman (talk) 02:40, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also @BenSpiller and Mnerkibac: you guys have contributed quite a bit to the page. Any thoughts on splitting it? Flowerkiller1692 (talk) 07:25, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I just had a read of this article. It is hilariously verbose, so that it seems almost written to force such a split. Take the following sentence, chosen from those visible on the open tab I have right now:

"On 10 March, Messi scored from 35 yards out and later had a penalty saved in a 1–1 away draw against last season’s Ligue 1 champions Paris Saint-Germain at the Parc des Princes in the second leg of the Champions League round of 16 as Barcelona were eliminated at this stage for the first time in 14 years by an aggregate score of 5–2 after having lost 4–1 at home on 16 February, with Messi scoring Barcelona's only goal in that game."

I mean, this is just ridiculous.

As a reminder to the editors of this article, an article on the "Career of Lionel Messi" must adhere to the same policies as any other. There is no free license to keep bloating the article with WP:INDISCRIMINATE details each year while paying zero attention to earlier bloating. But I doubt those who have authored this gargantuan 20,000 (!) word mess have every thought anything like "perhaps this minor piece of trivia shouldn't be included". I recently cut 4,000 words of cruft, minor details, and general bloating from Gaza War; it is staggering that an article on a footballer's career is so much worse. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:51, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose as per AirshipJungleman29. Solution is not to create another separate article, it's to clean up the verbose content here so that the article is a more appropriate length. Joseph2302 (talk) 22:18, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]