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Messi, Muller, Dean, Ronaldo: It’s the biggest ever one-season goal hauls

Football

Messi, Muller, Dean, Ronaldo: It’s the biggest ever one-season goal hauls

Messi, Muller, Dean, Ronaldo: It’s the biggest ever one-season goal hauls

Seventy-three goals in one season. That’s not a bad haul, right?

There are many ways to measure greatness, and it’s fair to say that goals scored won’t ever tell the whole story. Still, next time someone tries to tell you that Cristiano Ronaldo is better than Messi, you could do worse than bring up Lionel Messi’s 73 goals in the 2011-’12 campaign.

Of course, Messi isn’t the only player to rack up a startling stockpile of goals. Here’s our pick of the players who each notched up incredible numbers over the course of one outstanding season.

Lionel Messi

First up it’s the talismanic Barcelona man himself. Messi has set a whole bundle of records during his sensational stint with the Spanish club – but this has to be one of the most impressive.

In the ‘11-’12 season, the Argentine scored 50 league goals, 9 Cup goals, and 14 Champions League goals for Barca – also finding time to provide 28 assists, incidentally. It’s the most goals scored in a season by any player, according to the stats.

In Messi’s most prodigious season, it’s a little galling that the campaign was effectively a disappointment for the Catalan club – Barcelona failed to win either La Liga or the Champions League in this campaign, Pep Guardiola’s final year in charge of the club.

Yet if the team were not quite at their sharpest, Messi’s magnificence was impossible to deny. In one Champions League game the diminutive maestro scored five goals against a battered Bayer Leverkusen, another club record. In all, Messi scored a hat-trick or better in nine matches for Barcelona in this season.

Dixie Dean

One for the teenagers – okay, so the very mention of the name Dixie Dean conjures up images of black and white footage that seem a long way removed from today’s game. Actually, the football probably hasn’t changed that much – but the surrounding culture is unrecognisable.

While Dean was earning £6 a week during the 1920s and ‘30s, the Everton man was blazing a trail for English football, scoring a total of 349 goals for the Toffees during his 12-year stint with the team. That includes the 1927-28 season in England’s top flight; at just 21 years old, Dean scored 60 league goals.

This video above isn’t footage of the man in action, but it’s still worth a few minutes of your time. As members of Dean’s family recall, in those days if players won a medal they were offered the choice of keeping the medal or taking their wages that week – they couldn’t have both.

Gerd Muller

Muller is another figure from a bygone era – but “Der Bomber” deserves his place in history. Muller is second only to Messi in terms of goals scored in one season, accumulating 67 goals in all competitions for Bayern Munich during the 1972-’73 season.

A year earlier, Muller had scored a record 40 goals in the Bundesliga alone; to this day, that’s still the highest number of goals scored in the German top flight. In all, Muller scored 398 goals for Bayern in 453 appearances.

Cristiano Ronaldo

Okay, time to give CR7 his due – in his 2014-15 season with Real Madrid, Ronaldo scored a total of 61 goals for the Spanish club, with 48 league goals and ten in the Champions League.

It’s unquestionably a notable achievement. Yet in a neat bit of symmetry with Messi’s own highest goals achievement, detailed above, while Ronaldo enjoyed personal success, in this season his side were second best to bitter rivals Barcelona.

Barca won La Liga, the Copa Del Rey, and the Champions League this season; for Ronaldo, the goals proved little more than a consolation.

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