Hey guys, happy #SoccerLadumaDay to all of you. I hope you have already got the latest copy of your favourite football publication.
In this week's International Column, I wrote about Lionel Messi – the king of goalscorers – and as promised we tried to unpack the numbers around Telmo Zarra's goal tally to assess whether Messi has really broken the La Liga all-time record.
Messi scored a hat-trick against Sevilla in the Camp Nou this weekend to surpass Telmo Zarra's 251 La Liga goals, and according to official LFP information, Zarra's final goal tally was 251 goals.
However, eight different sources of information have concluded that his goal tally is somewhere between 242 and 265 goals.
The reasons behind this 23 goal discrepancy are because until 1948, players didn't use shirt numbers which lead to confusion about who to attribute a goal to.
In addition, there was no uniform criteria available for awarding goals, which means that there were disputes over potential own goals at the time.
Spanish sources have carefully analysed the data to come to the conclusion that Zarra's correct goal tally is, in fact, 253 goals rather than 251, which is the same number of goals that Lionel Messi now has after his hat-trick against Sevilla on Saturday.
So, it would seem that Lionel Messi has equalled, but not yet broken, Telmo Zarra's record goal-tally.
However, with Messi still going strong, it is only a matter of time until he can claim the real record. Whether Zarra has scored 251 goals, 253 goals or even 265 goals, Messi is more than likely to break all of these milestones, and possibly even score a couple hundred more.
Anyway, we don't want to become too technical and we should all take our hats off for Lionel Messi – the king of goalscorers.
Have a great Wednesday,
David
