Barca: still the best team in Europe

An Argentine, a Frenchman and a Cameroon. One summer’s day the Cameroon says to the other two: “Look, given that Barcelona no longer want to sell me, how about we get together and rewrite the football record books?” This sounds like the start of a joke, but it is actually the true story of Samuel Eto'o, Leo Messi and Thierry Henry. Last year Eto’o did not figure in the plans of Barcelona’s new manager, Guardiola. In the end, however, the Cameroon star stayed at Camp Nou and today tops the Spanish championship with 25 goals. If we add the 19 by Messi and 15 by Henry, we come to a total of 59 goals from this dream team. If they score 7 more before the end of the season, the three would equal the record set by Di Stefano, Puskas and Del Sol (Real Madrid) in the 1960-61 season. The rest of the team have scored 25 goals, bringing the total to 84 in 28 games. It only takes a quick bit of mental arithmetic to see that the total comes to 3 goals a game.

SPAIN - Too many figures are confusing, so we will simplify things by just talking about goal averages. Barca’s 3 goals a match are way ahead of all the other teams in Europe's main championships (England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France). Real Madrid come second in this special table: Huntelaar’s arrival has helped Raul, Higuain and the others to score 2.36 goals a game. In Spain, Atletico Madrid’s formidable duo of Aguero and Forlan are also putting the ball away (2 goals a game), followed by Valencia (1.78), and Villareal and Malaga (1.61). Barcelona’s superiority over all their opponents is also shown by the fact that the Catalans, despite having a super-attacking line-up, also boast the best defence, which has let in just 26 goals.

GERMANY - Returning again to the goal average, two German teams come after Real: Bayern with the trio of Klose-Toni-Ribery and Wolfsburg with Grafite and Dzeko, a not very famous but frighteningly effective pair of attackers. Their 2.12 in the Bundesliga is slightly better than Hoffenheim's 2.08 and the 1.84 of Bayer Leverkusen and Werder Bremen. In a championship that normally has a lot of goals like the German one, it is amazing that a team like Hertha is top of the league, when it is seventh in the goal scoring stakes with just 1.56 goals per game.

ENGLAND - Now lets look at the richest, most powerful and technically accomplished championship of the day: the English Premier League. Nothing amazing from Manchester United (1.69), despite having four great players in Ronaldo, Rooney, Berbatov and Tevez. Liverpool (1.80) are doing better than the Red Devils, with Chelsea (1.63) slightly behind, followed by Arsenal (1.6) and Manchester City (1.53).

ITALY AND FRANCE - What about Serie A? People who think that Mourinho is too fond of hard fought one-nils may not be wrong, but the figures show that no one in Italy scores as many as the Nerazzurri: 1.86 goals a game for Ibrahimovic and his team-mates, against the 1.76 of Juventus and Milan, the 1.52 of Roma and the 1.34 of Genoa, Fiorentina, Lazio and Palermo. Finally, a glance at the French Ligue 1 highlights more than anything the miserly 1.31 of table-topping Lyons, a club that has had uncontested dominance of that championship for years. Bordeaux (1.62) is more spectacular, while Marseilles comes in at 1.55 and the duo of Lille and Paris St Germain are on 1.41. It goes without saying that none of the teams mentioned after Barcelona have scored 59 goals, therefore no team has scored as many as the Cameroon, Argentine and Frenchman we talked about earlier. This one isn’t a joke either.

Therefore, as I've said in the title of this article, Barca is still the best team in Europe and in the world...