There was not a long time when Spanish football was accustomed to stratospheric struggles for the top scorer award in every championship. There have been years when both scored full points for Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. frequently exceeded 40 goals, on average more than once a day. The pinnacle of this scoring realm came in the academic year 2011-12. Argentina reached 50 (absolute record in its history LaLiga) and the Portuguese had to settle for 46.
Ten lessons later, the reality of the Spanish First Division is very different in this respect. The recently concluded season crowned Karim Benzema as the top scorer for the first time in his extensive career after scoring a goal. 24 goals. A record that won’t help him win the Pichichi Cup in any of the previous 18 seasons. To find a winner with so few goals you have to go back to the 2003/04 season. (Ronaldo Nazario) and to 2001/02 to find a lower record (Diego Tristan, 21).
Aspas, Vinicius, De Tomas…
Benzema is actually the only player to score 20 or more goals this season. In other words, he is the only player to score an average of more than one goal in every two games played. Next on this list Iago Aspas (18), Vinicius Junior (17) and Raul de Tomas (17)According to the official statistics of the competition collected by El Periódico de España.
The data is surprising, unlike what has happened in LaLiga in recent seasons. In fact, there were four guys who broke the 20 goal mark last year: Lionel Messi (30), Gerard Moreno (23), Benzema (23) and Luis Suarez (twenty one). The Argentine left Barça, the Spaniard have only played 17 games this season and the already experienced Uruguayan has seen his performance drop drastically.
The record for most players over 20 goals was achieved in the 2015/16 season, with seven players exceeding this margin. In the last 15 years, the usual thing is that about five guys hit twenty points each season. Again, you have to go back twenty years in the 2001/02 season to find another League where only one player has achieved this: 21 after Tristán, 18 after Morientes and Kluivert.
The loss of the top scorers in the championship is also reflected in the number of goals scored by all teams in a total of 38 rounds. As can be seen in the chart below, the recently concluded season isn’t the least productive of the recent series, but a gradual downward trend in the overall score.
The league with the most goals scored in 38 matches 2016/17 reached 1,118, an average of 29.4 per dayalmost three per game. Between 2007 and 2018 they always exceeded a thousand points and there has been a recession ever since. The 2021/22 season closed with 951 goals (167 below the record five years ago), 25 goals per date.2.5 per game, the fourth lowest figure of this century.
While there are several conditioning factors this season that help contextualize it, it is not possible to identify a single reason that explains this downward trend. Whether provisional or causal in the first place, video arbitration (VAR) was introduced in Spain in the 2018/19 season, and since then the thousand goal per season has not been met again.
Without Cristiano and Messi
The summer of 2018 marked Cristiano Ronaldo’s farewell to Real Madrid, his departure to Juventus, and the last summer in which Messi exceeded the 30-goal threshold. In these four years, the investment of the main teams’ striker has also decreased. Of the 10 most expensive signings of these seasons (40 in total), only nine have come down to pure forwards: Morata, Rafa Mir, Danjuma, Dia and Jovic. None of them have scored 20 goals so far and Morata doesn’t even play in Spain anymore. And a classic like Luis Suárez loses its effectiveness as a result of his seniority.
As strikers continue to exist, they only now appear more in other championships. Notable in recent years The proliferation of artillery in the German Bundesligaa league with fewer days (34) than other major championships, Robert Lewandowskinow claimed by Barcelona as a great reference.
While the A Series has also increased in the number of goalscorers in recent years, Premier League joins a similar process to LaLigaeven more obvious: 22 or 23 goals in the last four years have been enough to be top scorer in the English league.
As we wait for what will happen in the short term and with Lewandowski, Barça and Atletico’s desire to sign a ‘9’, the feeling is that there should be players who are already in LaLiga who will once again add weight to the list of big goalscorers. . The growth of Vinicius, Ansu Fati and Danjuma, the return of Griezmann to the scoring path or the continuity of Aubameyang’s streak They seem to be the best arguments for Spain to once again stand out as the land of artillery. But it doesn’t look easy.