So listen to this. There are a lot of bad football takes out there. Then there are some that are awful.
But there's a special kind that is just irritating. [music] And among those there is one that I just find excruciating. Messi's [music] 91 goal season is overrated.
Like come on. Garrett Mover set a record at 85 back in 1972. Back then, Sir Alex was just some striker playing out in Scotland and Pep Guardiola was a [music] literal baby.
[crying] 40 years later, that record had almost been forgotten in the sense that no one thought it could be broken. Sure, Kumari had miraculously hit 72 goals in the year 2000, but most Europeans brushed it off as something that could only happen outside of the top five leagues. However, then it happened.
91 goals in a single calendar year. For some perspective, that year the Euros were played, right? 368 players, 31 matches.
Do the math and counting substitutes and all that, that's 87 total player appearances. But still, altogether, they only scored 76 goals all tournament. Sure, it's a dumb comparison.
I'm including defenders, even goalkeepers, and it's the Euros. The standards are pretty high pretty much every match. However, I'll tell you this.
Ronaldo was obviously the second highest goal scorer that year with 63 goals that would have likely stolen all the headlines if not for Messi. Yet, take Benzema, Real Madrid's second highest goal scorer that year, had his goals to Ronaldos, and it's still only 93. That's just two more goals than Messi.
And you know what? If that still feels a bit underwhelming, I'll give you one final comparison that I think you'll appreciate. In that calendar year, Man City won their first Premier League title.
Their squad was stacked for goalc scoring options. Aguero, Jo, Balotelli, Teves, Yayore, Nazri, and still if you add together all of their goals, club and country, because I don't want to see anyone complaining in the comments about that, it all adds up [music] to 90. still one short of Messi.
And still, no matter what, I still feel like the one thing that makes that number look more impressive than anything else is that Messi himself never even got close to repeating it. He never even made it past 60 in any other year of his career. So, how can it be that there are still people out there who think that year was [music] overrated?
Well, first trolls, haters, whatever you want to call them. [music] But much more interestingly, as I was saying in the beginning, what annoys me the most in this [music] case is not that they're wrong. It's that they're actually kind of right just for the completely wrong reasons.
And I know, I know it sounds like I'm about to commit football sacrilege, but hear me out. If you could rewatch any year from Messi's career as if it were the first time, would you pick 2012? I don't think anyone who actually knows his career well would.
And the reason is simple. As amazing of an achievement, as amazing of a stats line as those 91 goals were, 2012 just wasn't his best year. Look, tell me another thing.
What are your top three favorite performances by Messi? The absolute most memorable, the ones that define who Messi is as a player in your head. I'll give you a few more seconds.
But I can bet almost none of you thought of any performances from 2012. And [music] you know why? Because if instead I had asked you to name the best performance from 2012, most of you would have told me it was the match where he scored five against Leverus, [music] which is phenomenal obviously, but it is also a last 16 match that had already been resolved in the first leg.
You see what I mean? The stakes weren't exactly the highest. Messi's season wouldn't have been any different if he hadn't scored any of those goals.
And that's it. Check any list of his top 10 or even top 20 ever performances online. That's the only one from that season that ever shows up.
Maybe some of you will mention that famous Eláico where both he and Ronaldo scored two. But really, and sort of ironically, that was like a two for one special, I don't think anyone sits and thinks that was one of Messi's best ever performances. And honestly, that was the overarching theme in 2012.
So, let's [music] break it down. First, the elephants in the room. How do you score 91 goals and not win the league?
Well, it's got to be the team, right? As I saw in one of your comments just a few days ago, football is a team game. Messi could score 91 goals, but if the keeper lets in 91, it's the keeper who lost him the trophy, not Messi.
However, that just doesn't apply because Barcelona had the best defensive record in the country. In fact, one obvious thing that has to be pointed out is that Barcelona had 91 points regardless, 30 more than third place Valencia. Those 91 points would have won them the league in every season from 1997 till 2009 at the beginning of the Ronaldo and Messi era.
Because that's the thing, Messi scored 91 goals that year, but obviously not all of them were in La Liga. And La Liga's top scorers table that year is the stuff of legend. Let's put it like this.
Falcao finished his season with 24 goals. That would have been enough to win him the Pichici Laiga top scorer award in 29 out of the 50 seasons up until Messi debuted. Yet if he checked the top of the goal scorer table at the end of the season, it finds Messi and just scored a few more goals than him.
He had scored more than double 50 goals in 37 games. before him. The record was 38 split between Ugo Sanchez and Delmo.
But Falcone wasn't the only one to get unlucky that year because in that top scorer stable between them both was Cristiano Ronaldo with 46 goals. Meaning [music] he was unlucky because he didn't even get an award for that. And Messi was unlucky because had any other player been in Ronaldo's place, he'd surely have won the league.
as much as 50 league goals is one of the most ridiculous things you've ever seen. Two guys scoring 96 league goals between them is even more ridiculous. And unfortunately, that four goal difference wasn't going to sway the league title anyone's way.
What ended up making the real difference was in which moments in which matches those goals were scored. Now, you could maybe argue that it was consistency that made the difference. But Messi scored in 26 out of the 38 match days, which is only two fewer than Ronaldo, and one of them was just because he didn't play.
So, I don't think that's where the problem lies. Another common thing is what the kids like to call stat padding, which can either mean scoring only when your team is already in front. And in that case, well, 66% of Messi's goals came precisely in those moments, while Ronaldo did substantially better with just 50%.
On the other hand, set petting can also mean mostly only scoring against the weakest teams in the league. But there the median and average position of the clubs they scored against is ninth [music] or 10th for both, which tends to happen when you score pretty much against everyone, which [music] is precisely what Ronaldo did that season. Whereas Messi, he did miss two teams.
Sporting Ghanon, which doesn't matter much, and Real Madrid, that's what you're looking for. The margins were so tight that season that it all came down to a single week, not just in La Liga, but in the Champions League as well. On the other side of the coin, things were ironically kind of similar.
I could make a whole point about how strange it was that even though up till that year, Messi had been the only one to break past the 10 goal mark in the Champions League since the 1970s. Now, suddenly, just as he hit an incredible 14 goals, he had not Ronaldo, but Mario Gomez right below him with 12. But he wasn't the one who knocked Messi out of the competition.
Mario Gomez knocked out Ronaldo. Messi, he had to play Chelsea. In the span of seven days, he had both legs of a Champions League semi-final to play, as well as an Lcláico deemed as a title decider right in between [music] them.
Going in, Messi was on a streak of 26 goals in 14 games. 14 games in which Barcelona had won 13 and never gotten defeated, while Chelsea weren't even top five in their league. Yet that day, as unlucky as they may have been, even hitting the post twice, they lost 1 nil.
that already broke their mentality quite a bit. But then, you know, having already failed to score in his previous three Eláico as the newspapers claimed there were two men in one league for the taking. [music] Even if creatively Messi had a decent game, just as he had against Chelsea, he just seemed completely unable to lose the defenders and get himself in positions to score.
And so, it all ended with the infamous Scalma celebration. By the third of those matches, the second leg against Chelsea, they had no option but to come back and win. However, even though Messi would be assisting the goal that put them in front 2 minutes off of halftime.
Not only did Chelsea somehow take back the lead before the break, even if only on away goals, but right as the match restarted, Fabregas went down in the box, yet after scoring all 12 of his penalties that season, Messi hit the bar. After that, he kind of lost it. There have not been many times where I've seen Messi tried to dribble past the whole team over and over again like that.
And yeah, it did hit the post in the 83rd minute, but by then he had already lost possession 36 times. [music] And once Torres buried in another in injury time, it was over. [music] Season ruined.
In the very last game, at least they scavenged the Copa Ray. But anyone could easily argue that Messi only scored in the final once they were already ahead. And aside from that, he hadn't even scored against Valencia in either leg of the semis or against Real in either leg of the quarters.
It's not just about how many goals, but about when those goals are scored. And as the following year started with Guardiola gone, Messi seemed to be after some kind of redemption, scoring no real Classicos played in that first half. But even that wasn't enough for the Spanish Super Cup.
And after that, there were no more trophies to play for in 2012. So, the real question is, how can it be that out of all the years, it was in the one where he scored the most that Messi seemed to be the least clutch he's ever been? Well, I have a theory.
If you look at the timeline, his heat maps, whatever, that was his final year as a false nine. Maybe you could argue 2013, but that didn't look too good either. I mean, he literally went from 91 goals to 45.
That's less than half. And already then, he was morphing into a deeper role. The thing is that false nine role have worked incredibly well from 2009 to 2011.
So what was different? [music] I think that just as Guardiola's tactics had shocked the world back in 2009, by 2012, even if some teams were still behind, the very best had caught up and now they knew more or less what were the best ways to stop them. In the words of Guardial himself a few years later, we were playing brilliantly, but I was on my knees and had no new tactical ideas left.
That was why I had to leave. People forget he was still just a rookie manager at the time. Sure, he had made his ideal football philosophy work, but what comes next?
That's an even harder problem to solve, and you could see it. This guy had Barcelona playing in a 370 formation at the Club World Cup. And even worse for a guy still learning his ropes.
The Barcelona president at the time, Sandra Hosel, reportedly rejected his plans to make drastic changes to the squad when Pep realized they were about to get left behind. There's claims he was willing to go as far as selling both PK, Danny Alves, and Fabreach, but they just didn't let him. Add to that the injury of David Villa.
And from my perspective, I see that Guardiola was left with a system that was imbalanced, in need of a rework, and without the proper tools for that, he looked to the one player he trusted above all and decided to just put his old tactics into overdrive and just hope for the best. But the reality is that with everything flowing towards Messi while also expecting him to help a bit with a buildup, even if his impossibly high usage rates allowed him to put up numbers never seen before, he also ended up being stretched thin. [music] And of course, not only is that the kind of thing that tends to show up the most in big games, but those were precisely the ones against the teams that were now starting to somewhat learn not to stop that system.
In other words, that version of Massie got pushed further and further, shining brighter and brighter until it just burned out like a supernova. And you saw that in 2013 as he went for virtually no injuries in 3 years to spending 126 days on the sidelines then. Not to mention that, yeah, his goal tally got cut in half.
If putting Messi in the middle felt like a stroke of genius at first, by the [music] end, he barely looked like the Messi we knew from before. Listen, one thing that I find funny [music] when some casual Massie fan claims that 2012 was his best year is that technically you could argue that was his most penaldo year. Not only did his assist numbers get cut in almost half from the year before, but 78 out of those 91 goals were scored from inside the box.
He took 17 penalties that year. Aside from Hernaldo and Moabil, that's maybe the record. And I feel Messi fans especially always sulk down on tap-ins, but I went over the 91 goals one by one.
And though some may be debatable, I'd say around 40% of his goals were either penalties or tapins. In fact, similarly, even though not all of those are tap-ins, one thing that surprised me was that 57% of his goals were scored with one single touch. If you compare that to his [music] dribbling peak of 2010, back then it was only 36%.
When I picture Messi, I picture him dribbling through whole defenses at once. But for the most part of 2012, as you can see, that was not the Messi we got. In conclusion, I feel like that take is kind of like that meme where the dumbest football fans claim 2012 is overrated because they just hate Messi.
The casuals claim it is the best year ever because of the big flashy number. And finally, there's the hardcore Messi fans who really understand his career and understand that he definitely had better years than 2012. And if you're asking what years those were, well, a lot of people like 2018 or 2019, a more mature Messi sitting a bit deeper in 2018 still managing just 57 minutes per goal contribution.
His second best after 2012, but we all know that was not it. There's also the sexuple year in 2009, but he was still young. His numbers weren't quite there.
2015 is obviously incredibly memorable. Great numbers, a lot of trophies, almost all you need. But Neymar took the spotlight away from him far too often for that to be the one.
Personally, I always wonder about 2010. I mean, the numbers were already insane on their own. But then you realize he wasn't the main penalty or free kick taker.
And guess what? if he'd had the chance to score 14 penalties and seven free kicks the way he had in 2012. It'd be up to 79 goals in five fewer games, that's 67 minutes per goal.
In 2012, he was at 66. And aside from that, it was his peak dribbling season. However, still only the league and Super Cup, so I guess that leaves us with a year that in my opinion is the one to rule them all, 2011.
Sure, 59 goals are a lot less than 91. But that year, Messi put down 37 assists, [music] meaning he did not have the all-time record for the most goals in a calendar year, but he did have the record for the most assists ever. [music] And even if his time with Argentina was a bit disappointing at Barcelona, it wasn't just that he averaged a goal contribution every 60 minutes, but he did that while taking five out of the six trophies, only missing out on the Cup of Del Rey all throughout scoring in every other final with maybe his best ever performance in the UCL final after having already scored in every knockout round to get them there.
[music] And guess what? La Liga top scorer that year was Ronaldo. It's not about how many you score, it's about when you score them.
