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When it comes to Lionel Messi, you might be excused for thinking there are no more records left to break, but great Barcelona has set a great one, and it was one that was almost completely lost.
With his 65th-minute goal against Real Valladolid on December 22, Messi scored his 644th goal for Barça, breaking a long-standing record set by none other than the great Pelé nearly half a century ago. Surprisingly, Messi has scored more goals for a single club than any other player in football history.
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- Lionel Messi’s evolution as a player: from substitute for Ronaldinho at Barcelona to candidate for GOAT Messi made his debut at Barcelona 16 years ago. A lot has happened since then Messi joins Ronaldo, Pelé, Puskas, Romario in the 700-goal club
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Messi, 33, has reached the historic milestone a few months after trying to leave Barcelona in the summer, only to announce a week later that he would stay and fulfill the final season of his contract.
The record is a new highlight in his dizzying collection of records: he is La Liga’s top scorer (451); the player with the most hat tricks in the top Spanish category (35); the man who has scored the most goals (91) for the club and the national team in a calendar year; the only player to have scored more than 50 goals or more in nine different seasons; the winner of the largest number of Ballons d’Or in history (six).
Here’s a look at the game’s other scoring titans joining Messi in the top 10 all-time scorers for a club, according to FIFA.
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10. Cristiano Ronaldo (450 in 438 for Real Madrid)
Aside from Messi, Ronaldo is the only other active player in the top 10 thanks to the incredible number of goals he scored for Real Madrid. This despite the fact that the Portugal captain only spent nine relatively brief seasons at the Bernabéu compared to the 17 Messi has under his belt at Barça. After scoring 35 goals in total in his debut season for The whites (2009-10), Ronaldo never fell below 40 in a campaign and peaked with 55 consecutive goals in 2011-12 and 2012-13.
With his move to Juventus in 2018, the 35-year-old Ronaldo is unlikely to gain much ground over Messi in single-club stakes – that is, unless there is a surprising return to the Bernabéu before his illustrious end career. Which, given he’s said in the past that he can see himself playing until he’s 40, isn’t totally out of the question.
9. Eusebio (473 goals in 440 games with Benfica)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKY7nBaUqcI
Not many clubs appreciate a player as emphatically as Benfica does when it comes to the late Eusebio, one of the all-time greats to play the sport. The center forward played a decisive role in the glory years of the Portuguese side, spent 15 seasons at the Estadio da Luz between 1960 and 1975 and won the league title 11 times, as well as a victory in the final of the European Cup. on Real Madrid in 1962. During that period, Eusebio also won the European Golden Shoe as the continent’s top scorer on two occasions, the first of which was the inaugural presentation of the award in 1968.
8. Uwe Seeler (507 goals in 587 appearances for Hamburg)
Seeler, one of the true greats of Germany and a player for only one club, spent his entire 18-year career in Hamburg after going through the lower ranks. His first-team debut at age 18, in which he scored four goals in an 8-2 win over Holstein Kiel in 1954, set the stage for things to come. While the first 10 years of his career predate the formation of the Bundesliga, Seeler remains one of the league’s top 20 scorers of all time after scoring 137 times in 239 games after the league started in 1963. .
7. Jimmy Jones (517 goals in 419 games with Glenavon)
A goal from Jimmy Jones and an own goal were enough to make the Club the first provincial club to win the league and cup double and️ # OTD # OnThisDay # MourneviewMemories # BeJustAndFearNot
– Glenavon FC (@Glenavon_FC) April 13, 2020
Over the course of 11 seasons at Glenavon in Northern Ireland, Jones set the record for the most goals scored in a single competitive season. He scored 74 phenomenal goals during the 1956-57 Irish League campaign that won the Lurgan Blues championship, a record that still stands to this day. Messi came close to matching Jones’ loot in 2011-12, but sadly, the Barcelona star fell a goal away after finishing the season with 73 goals to his name.
6. Jimmy McGrory (522 goals in 501 games for Celtic)
McGrory spent 15 years at Celtic as a player between 1922 and 1937 before returning to manage the Scottish club after World War II, a position in which he remained for almost two decades. A diminutive forward who still became famous and feared for his aerial prowess, McGrory peaked with a streak of 143 league and cup goals in 152 games over the course of five seasons between 1925 and 1930. This sparked interest. from Arsenal but, despite London club making a world record transfer offer of £ 10,000, McGrory turned them down and remained in Glasgow.
5. Josef Bican (534 goals in 274 games with Slavia Prague)
⭐ Josef Bican was born 107 years ago!
Bican played for Slavia between 1937 and 1948 and returned to red and white in 1953 for four more years. He scored nearly 1,500 goals in total during his playing days! #slaviaprague pic.twitter.com/BykdodVpY9
– SK Slavia Prague EN (@slavia_eng) September 25, 2020
Not only is Bican one of the best scorers the game has ever graced, he is also one of a very small group of footballers who have played international soccer in three different countries after the Vienna-born forward won the Austrian team. , Czechoslovakia. and Bohemia and Moravia. As expected, the player known as “Pepi“He is Slavia’s all-time top scorer after averaging a frankly ridiculous 1.95 goals per game during his eight seasons with the Czech team, even scoring seven goals in one game on three separate occasions.
4. Fernando Peyroteo (544 goals in 334 games with Sporting Lisbon)
Peyroteo spent his entire career at Sporting, joining them as a teenager in 1937 and leaving in 1949 after his retirement from the sport at the age of 31. The powerful forward ended each of his 12 seasons at Sporting with more goals than appearances. He also scored more than 40 goals in a single season on two occasions, both times in the last three years of his time with the Portuguese giants. No wonder the club still calls him “a goal scoring machine“- a scoring machine.
3. Gerd Muller (564 goals in 605 games for Bayern Munich)
Originally said that he looked too much like a “weightlifter” to play professional football, German legend Muller got used to confusing naysayers by scoring 735 goals for the club and the country over the course of his career from 1963 to 1981. Extremely prolific, Muller averaged at least one goal per game in most of the 14 seasons he spent at Bayern, notably setting the record for most goals in a calendar year (85) in 1972, a record that stood for 40 years prior. of breaking in 2012 by (surprise, surprise) Lionel Messi.
2. Pelé (643 goals in 659 games for Santos)
The iconic Brazilian forward first signed for Santos in 1956 at the age of 15 and stayed true to the Alvinegro until 1974, averaging nearly one goal per game throughout his 19 seasons. During the period he also became the first (and remains the only) player, male or female, to win three World Cups. At 16, Pelé had already finished the season as the top scorer in the Brazilian championship and the goals kept coming. The king He finally left Santos to join the New York Cosmos at the age of 33, the same age that Messi is now.
1. Lionel Messi (643 goals in 748 games for Barcelona) [AFTER MATCH ON DEC. 19]
The 2020-21 season is Messi’s seventeenth overall campaign at Camp Nou since he debuted in the senior first team with Pep Guardiola so many years ago. The first goal came on May 1, 2005 when the long-haired Argentine teenager came off the bench in the 88th minute to score in Barça’s 2-0 victory over Albacete. Messi opened his account with a graceful lob over the goalkeeper from close range after Ronaldinho had passed the ball over the defense to his young protégé, moments after the two combined for a very similar goal that was ruled out by offside. Since then he has gone from strength to strength, scoring goals in the Champions League finals, hat tricks in Classic, regularly breaking the 50 goal mark in one season and all while having the nerve to make it look easy.
Source: espn.co.uk
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