Athlete Teresa Perales (center), president of the Jury for the Princess of Asturias Award for Sports, announces that Argentine footballer Lionel Messi has won the 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Sports this Wednesday in Oviedo. EFE/Eloy Alonso
Oviedo, June 3 (EFE) – The jury of the 2026 Princess of Asturias Sports Award honored Argentine footballer Leo Messi this Wednesday for his “dazzling talent” and his “exceptional sporting career”, but also for “his formidable and continuous solidarity work to promote access to education and health care for the most disadvantaged children”.
The jury, which was chaired by swimmer Teresa Perales, who won this same award in 2021, considered that Messi, world champion with Argentina in 2022 and who this year will play in his sixth World Cup, is the player who has won the most titles in the history of football.
Furthermore, he highlighted that Messi has earned “the respect and admiration of everyone for his exemplary behavior on the field and for his consistency, humility and commitment to the collective game,” according to the minutes that were read this afternoon in Oviedo.
Messi’s candidacy was proposed by the president of the Vetusta University of Oviedo Triathlon Club, David González Alonso, and in the jury’s deliberations he prevailed over twenty-six others from a dozen nationalities.
Messi takes over from Serena Williams
This award was given last year to American tennis player Serena Williams for her “unquestionable sporting record”, with 73 individual titles, including 23 Grand Slams and 4 Olympic golds, as well as for her constant advocacy of gender equality, according to the jury’s statement.
In the most recent editions, this award has gone to Spanish badminton player Carolina Marín; Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge; the Olympic Refugee Foundation and the Refugee Olympic Team; Spanish swimmer Teresa Perales; Spanish racing driver Carlos Sainz; American skier Lindsey Vonn; mountaineers Reinhold Messner (Italian) and Krzysztof Wielicki (Polish); and the New Zealand men’s rugby team, known as the ‘All Blacks’.
The Princess of Asturias Sports Award was the sixth of the eight awards to be announced this year, in which these awards reach their forty-sixth edition.
In recent weeks, the following have been honored: American singer Patti Smith, in the Arts category; Japanese animation producer Studio Ghibli, in Communication and Humanities; British chemists David Klenerman and Shankar Balasubramanian and French biophysicist Pascal Mayer, pioneers in the development of rapid DNA sequencing, in Scientific and Technical Research; the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in International Cooperation; and British historian, journalist and essayist Timothy Garton Ash, in Social Sciences.
The awards for Literature, on June 10, and for Concord, a week later, are still to be decided.
The Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony will be held, as is tradition, in October in a solemn ceremony presided over by the King and Queen at the Campoamor Theatre in Oviedo, accompanied by Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía. EFE
