The Camp Nou held its collective breath as Lionel Messi steadied himself for the free-kick. Barcelona was already leading 2-0 in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final against Liverpool. As the referee blew his whistle, Messi took a short run up and curled his free kick strike 29 meters from the Liverpool net. The ball curved to the right, narrowly avoiding the defenders at the wall and sailed over Alisson Becker’s outstretched arm before lodging itself in the back of the net just inches below the crossbar. The stadium erupted. Messi had scored his 600th goal for Barcelona.
Messi’s 600 goals for Barcelona have come in 683 games, at a staggering record of 0.9 goals per game. He already holds the record of Barcelona’s top-scorer after he surpassed Cesar Rodriguez’s 232 goals in March 2012. Rodriguez last-played for Barcelona in 1954.
Over the years, Messi has shown no signs of stopping. On an average he has scored over 30 goals in every season since 2010. His best performance was in the year 2012 when he scored 59 goals in La Liga and netted 13 times in the Champions League. He has scored 12 goals in the Champions League already this year as FC Barcelona chases its fifth title.
Yearly goals scored by Lionel Messi
Source: Messi Stats
In La Liga, Messi has enjoyed playing against Sevilla with 36 goals in 35 games, the most against any side in the competition. His rate of scoring has been the highest against Rayo Vallecano with 1.7 goals per game. He has found the back of the net 26 times in 39 matches against Real Madrid, Barcelona’s long-standing rivals.
Lionel Messi's goals against other teams in European football
Source: Transfer Market
His 600th goal came via a direct free-kick making it his 42nd goal overall through this form of set pieces. Since the 2014/15 season, Messi has scored 17 goals in 179 attempts via free-kicks at a conversion rate of 9.5. While he features among the top-15 players with the best conversion rates, he has scored the maximum number of goals among his rivals. He clearly prefers his left foot as 82% of his goals have been scored off it while his right-foot accounts for 14%. Only 4% of his goals have come from headers.
The way Messi scores
Source: Messi Stats
How he's done it
Source: Messi Stats
What sets Messi apart isn’t just raw numbers but how he achieves them. Data from understat.com that tabulates Expected Goals (xG) for each season show that Messi has consistently scored more goals than what is normally expected in the circumstances where he had taken shots at goal. xG measures the quality of a chance and predicts the likelihood of a shot resulting in a goal. An xG of 0.5 would mean, of 10 shots in various circumstances (location, angle, number of players to beat, etc), only five of them are likely to result in a goal. For example, a tap-in from near the goal-line would have a xG of 1.0, while a shot taken directly at goal from a corner would have a xG of near zero.
Data on xG is available on understat.com from the 2013-14 season and except the 2015/16 season, Messi has surpassed the expectations by an average of six goals per season. This season alone, he has exceeded his xG by 9.63 goals.
Lionel Messi: Expected goals v actual goals scored
In sum, Messi doesn’t just score plenty of goals because he plays in a world class team that provides him the chances to thrive in frontl, but he exceeds expectations by creating chances for himself and his team.
