Primera Division Women Alexia Putellas now stands alone. With Barcelona’s 4-1 win over Espanyol on 22 April that sealed the 2025-26 Liga F title, the Catalan midfielder lifted her 36th trophy in blaugrana colours — passing Lionel Messi’s 35 and becoming the most-decorated player in FC Barcelona’s 126-year history.
The milestone, confirmed officially by the club’s women’s side on social media, came after Barcelona were crowned Liga F champions for a seventh straight season — Putellas’s ninth domestic league title. The 32-year-old has been at Barça since 2012; the trophies started arriving in 2013 and have not stopped.
What 36 trophies actually looks like
The breakdown, drawn from FC Barcelona’s official records and Wikipedia:
- 9 Liga F titles (including seven in a row from 2019-20 to 2025-26)
- 10 Copa de la Reina wins
- 3 UEFA Women’s Champions League trophies (2020-21, 2022-23, 2023-24)
- 4 Supercopa de España titles
- 10 Copa Catalunya wins (Catalonia’s regional cup)
That is 36 collective senior honours in roughly 13 seasons — a strike-rate of nearly three trophies per year. None of the major women’s players currently active at any other European club come close.
Surpassing Messi at Barcelona
Lionel Messi finished his Barcelona career in 2021 with 35 trophies, a number that had defined the club’s most-decorated record for four years. Putellas equalled it earlier in 2026 with January’s Supercopa de España win. The Liga F clinching against Espanyol on 22 April tipped her past it.
The comparison is not perfectly clean — Messi’s 35 trophies came in a more competitive men’s ecosystem, and women’s football has multiple regional cup competitions (the Copa Catalunya being the obvious example) that the men’s side does not always contest. But the raw count is the raw count, and inside Barcelona that record matters.
The Cristiano Ronaldo footnote
One stat doing the rounds: Putellas’s career trophies — adding her two senior Spain honours (the 2023 World Cup and the 2024 UEFA Women’s Nations League) to her Barça count — now exceed Cristiano Ronaldo’s career total of 35.
It is a different framing of the same milestone, and it has travelled fast on social media because it bridges two football audiences that rarely collide. The OptaJoe-flavoured stats accounts have run the numbers; the headline holds up.
What’s next: Lyon, Oslo, 23 May
Barcelona will play OL Lyonnes (the side formerly known as Olympique Lyonnais) in the UEFA Women’s Champions League final on Saturday 23 May 2026 in Oslo — a sixth consecutive Champions League final, sealed by a 4-2 home win over Bayern Munich on 3 May (5-3 on aggregate) in which Putellas scored twice. A win in Oslo would make it 37 for Putellas, and a fourth Champions League medal, before her 33rd birthday in February 2027.
The Copa de la Reina final on 16 May is also still to come. By the end of June Putellas could plausibly be on 38 trophies. She is also up for the 2026 Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year, alongside team-mate Aitana Bonmatí.
The bigger picture
Trophy counts in women’s football have always been complicated by uneven competition structures and the relatively recent professionalisation of the elite leagues. What Putellas has done — staying at one club for 13 years, lifting silverware in nearly every season, adding Spain’s first World Cup along the way — is the closest thing the women’s game has to the Messi-at-Barcelona blueprint.
Whether the comparison flatters her or undersells her depends on how you weigh up the two eras. Either way, the number is now 36, and only one player at one club has ever held it.
