Who has scored the most hat-tricks in La Liga?

Lionel Messi, with 36, every one of them for Barcelona. Cristiano Ronaldo is second on 34, all for Real Madrid. Telmo Zarra is the leading pre-television-era figure on 23.

Does a four-goal or five-goal game count as one hat-trick?

Yes. The convention used across Spanish football records is that any match in which a player scores three or more goals counts as a single hat-trick. That is why Messi's 36 and Ronaldo's 34 include their four- and five-goal matches.

What was the first hat-trick in La Liga?

Jaime Lazcano scored four for Real Madrid in a 5–0 win over Europa on 10 February 1929, in the league's opening weeks. Manuel Cros and Carmelo both followed a week later on 17 February.

What is the most goals scored by one player in a La Liga match?

Seven, achieved twice: by Bata for Athletic Bilbao in 1931 and by László Kubala for Barcelona in 1952. Neither has been matched in more than seventy years.

Which club has produced the most La Liga hat-tricks?

Real Madrid, with 200 as of 28 August 2026, one ahead of Barcelona on 199. The two are far clear of Athletic Bilbao on 120.

Hat-Tricks in La Liga History: The Complete Record

The players with the most La Liga hat-tricks

Two players sit so far above the rest of this list that the record has effectively become a private argument between them. Messi finished with 36, Ronaldo with 34. Third place is thirteen behind.

Rank	Player	Hat-tricks	Last one
1	Lionel Messi (ARG)	36	22 Feb 2020
2	Cristiano Ronaldo (POR)	34	18 Mar 2018
3	Telmo Zarra (ESP)	23	15 Mar 1953
4	Alfredo Di Stéfano (ARG)	22	15 Mar 1964
5	Mundo (ESP)	19	4 Mar 1951
6	César Rodríguez (ESP)	15	19 Oct 1952
7	Isidro Lángara (ESP)	13	15 Dec 1946
8	Ferenc Puskás (HUN)	12	15 Dec 1963
=9	Pahiño (ESP)	11	11 Sep 1955
=9	Manuel Badenes (ESP)	11	29 Mar 1958
=9	László Kubala (HUN)	11	19 Mar 1961
=12	Quini (ESP)	10	7 Oct 1981
=12	Luis Suárez (URU)	10	28 Oct 2018

Messi took the record from Ronaldo on 7 December 2019, scoring three in a 5–2 win over Mallorca to move to 35, then added his 36th against Eibar the following February. Ronaldo had already left for Juventus by then, which is part of why the number stopped where it did.

What the table hides is how compressed the modern entries are. Messi and Ronaldo scored 70 hat-tricks between them in roughly a decade of overlap. Zarra needed fourteen seasons for his 23.

Why the counting rule matters

A hat-trick here means three or more goals in one match, and each such match counts once. A four-goal game is one hat-trick, not one hat-trick plus a goal. So is a seven-goal game.

This is worth stating plainly because it is the single most common source of confusion when people compare figures from different sites. Some sources count “trebles” separately from four-goal hauls; Spanish league records do not. Messi’s 36 and Ronaldo’s 34 both include multiple four- and five-goal matches.

Only first-division league fixtures count. Copa del Rey, Champions League, Supercopa and international goals are excluded, which is why a player’s “career hat-tricks” figure elsewhere will usually be considerably higher than the number in this table.

The first hat-trick, three weeks into the league’s existence

La Liga began in February 1929 with ten clubs. It did not take long.

On 10 February 1929, Jaime Lazcano scored four for Real Madrid in a 5–0 win over Europa — the first hat-trick in the competition’s history, and a four-goal one at that. A week later, on 17 February, two more arrived on the same day: Manuel Cros scored four for Europa against Arenas in a 5–2 win, and Carmelo scored for Athletic Bilbao in a 9–0 demolition of Espanyol.

The first three hat-tricks in La Liga history were all scored inside eight days. Defences in 1929 were organised on very different principles, and scorelines like 9–0 were not the anomaly they would be today.

The seven-goal matches

The most goals any player has scored in a single La Liga match is seven, and it has happened exactly twice:

Bata, for Athletic Bilbao, in 1931
László Kubala, for Barcelona, in 1952

Neither has been approached in over seventy years. Kubala’s seven is the more remarkable of the two for a simple reason: he also appears on the all-time hat-trick list above, on 11, meaning the seven-goal game was not a one-off aberration in an otherwise ordinary career.

The record for most hat-tricks in a single season is eight, shared — inevitably — by Messi in 2011–12 and Ronaldo in 2014–15.

Hat-tricks by club

Club totals tell a different story from the player list, because they accumulate across a century rather than a career.

Club	Hat-tricks	Most recent
Real Madrid	200	26 Aug 2026
Barcelona	199	15 Mar 2026
Athletic Bilbao	120	8 Feb 2025
Atlético Madrid	112	24 Sep 2025
Valencia	105	8 Nov 2020
Sevilla	86	23 Jan 2021
Espanyol	57	14 Sep 2024
Real Sociedad	49	21 Feb 2021
Celta Vigo	40	19 Apr 2025

Real Madrid reached 200 in August 2026, one clear of Barcelona. Given that the two clubs have supplied the top two players on the individual list, the closeness of the club totals is less surprising than it looks — Messi’s 36 and Ronaldo’s 34 account for roughly a sixth of each club’s entire century-long tally.

Note how far back some of the “most recent” dates run. Valencia has not had a hat-trick since November 2020, and Sevilla not since January 2021. Hat-tricks cluster in squads with a dominant central scorer, and both clubs have spent recent seasons without one.

A note on the dates in this table

The two Wikipedia tables that compile this record disagree on the date of Cristiano Ronaldo’s final La Liga hat-trick: one gives 10 February 2018, the other 18 March 2018. We have used 18 March 2018, the date given in the actively maintained match-by-match list, but the discrepancy is unresolved in the public sources and we are flagging it rather than presenting a clean answer we cannot support.

The hat-trick counts themselves are consistent across every source we checked.