There was a time not too long ago when Spanish football got used to stratospheric fights for the top scorer award in each championship. They were the years of full scoring for Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, in which both frequently exceeded the figure of 40 goals, more than one per day on average. The peak of this scoring binge came in the 2011-12 academic year, when the Argentine reached 50 (absolute record in the history of LaLiga) and the Portuguese had to settle for 46.
Ten courses later, the reality of the Spanish First Division is very different in that facet. The recently completed season crowned Karim Benzema as top scorer, for the first time in his extensive career after scoring 24 goals. A record that in none of the previous 18 seasons would have helped him win the Pichichi Trophy. You have to go back to the 2003/04 season to find a winner with so few goals (Ronaldo Nazario) and to 2001/02 to find a lower record (Diego Tristan, 21).
Aspas, Vinicius, De Tomás…
Benzema is, in fact, the only player to have scored 20 goals or more this season. In other words, the only player who has been able to score an average of more than one goal every two games played. Next on this list are 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 in contrast to what has happened in LaLiga in recent seasons. In fact, last year there were four men who broke the 20-goal barrier: Messi (30), Gerard Moreno (23), Benzema (23) y Luis Suarez (21). The Argentine left Barça, the Spaniard has only been able to play 17 games this season and the already veteran Uruguayan has seen his performance greatly diminished.
The record in the list of most players over 20 goals was reached in the 2015/16 season, when there were seven players who exceeded that margin. During the last 15 years, it has been the norm that around five men have reached their twenties each year. Again, you have to go back two decades, the 2001/02 season, to find another League in which only one player achieved it: after the 21 of Tristán, the 18 of Morientes and Kluivert.
The loss of top scorers in the championship is also reflected in the number of goals scored by all teams in the 38 rounds overall. As can be seen in the following graph, the recently completed season is not the least prolific of the recent series, but it does fall within a gradual downward trend in the overall score.
The League of 38 games with the most goals in history was 2016/17, in which 1,118 were reached, an average of 29.4 per dayalmost three per game. Between 2007 and 2018 they always exceeded a thousand points and since then there has been a stagnation. The 2021/22 season closed with 951 goals (167 below the record of five years ago), 25 per date2.5 per game, the fourth lowest figure this century.
It is not possible to identify a single reason that explains this downward trend, although there have been several conditioning factors this season that help to contextualize it. In the first place, be it casual or causal, in the 2018/19 season the application of video arbitration (VAR) began in Spain and since then the thousand goals per season have not been reached again.
Without Cristiano and Messi
That summer of 2018 was also Cristiano Ronaldo’s goodbye to Real Madrid, heading to Juventus, and the last one in which Messi surpassed the 30-goal barrier. In these four years, the investment in center forwards of the main teams has also been reduced. Of the 10 most expensive signings of these seasons (40 in total), only nine have corresponded to pure strikers: Morata, Rafa Mir, Danjuma, Dia and Jovic. None of them have reached 20 goals so far and Morata doesn’t even play in Spain anymore. And a classic like Luis Suárez has been losing effectiveness, the result of his seniority.
Because the scorers continue to exist, only now they abound more in other championships. It is striking in recent years the proliferation of gunners in the German Bundesligaa league that also has fewer days (34) than the rest of the main championships, with Robert Lewandowskinow claimed by Barcelona, as a great reference.
Series A has also experienced an increase in scorers in recent years, while the Premier League attends a process similar to that of LaLigaeven more pronounced: in the last four years 22 or 23 goals have been enough to be crowned top scorer in the English league.
In the short term, and while waiting for what happens with Lewandowski and Barça and Atlético’s aspiration to sign a ‘9’, the feeling is that it has to be players who are already in LaLiga who are once again fattening up the list of great scorers. The growth of Vinicius, Ansu Fati and Danjuma, Griezmann’s return to scoring path or the continuity of Aubameyang’s streak They seem to be the best arguments for Spain to once again stand out as a land of artillerymen. But it doesn’t seem easy.
