Flair, fluency, and a feast of goals come to mind when we think of La Liga. It has been one of the best league tournaments globally for decades, with a particularly sensational period between 2000 and 2018 when more than 50% of the total Champions League winners were Spain’s two big clubs: Real Madrid and Barcelona. Unsurprisingly, the best players in the world regularly featured for Spanish clubs during this era.
The La Liga top goalscorer contest is a fierce race to this day, with many of the most well-known players in club football vying to get hold of Trofeo Pichichi.
All the latest football odds are on talkSPORT BET, and here we give you a flavour of what the competition for the top scorer in Spain has looked like over the years.
The History of La Liga Top Goalscorer Award
Since 1952, Marca has named the La Liga top goalscorer each season and presented the award. Slightly confusingly, this has nothing to do with La Liga itself, as Marca is an independent sports newspaper. Still, it’s widely considered the de facto award as Spain’s number one sports publishing outlet.
The trophy is named after Athletic Bilbao forward Rafael Moreno Aranzadi, nicknamed ‘Pichichi’, to honour his achievements at the Basque club during the early part of the 20th century. Perhaps fittingly, players representing clubs from the Basque country dominated the early seasons when the top goalscorer was recorded, with Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao attackers scoring the most.
Athletic Bilbao’s Telmo Zarra set the record of seasons as top scorer at six, an accomplishment that wasn’t surpassed for almost 70 years. Then the 1950s arrived, and Alfredo Di Stéfano burst onto the scene as Real Madrid began to dominate, redefining Spanish football and winning five top-scorer awards in the process. Even though he didn’t match Zarra’s Pichichi haul, his legacy is untarnished, and his name is still echoed in every part of Spain.
Those who thought that Los Blancos’ period of dominance would end with Di Stéfano’s career in its twilight got a rude awakening when Ferenc Puskás landed in the Spanish capital. The Hungarian finished four seasons as the top scorer in La Liga. It would posthumously be enshrined in common football parlance, with FIFA’s award for best goal of the year across all competitions named after him.
Quini and Hugo Sánchez managed to collect five Pichichi trophies each. Somewhat breaking the pattern, the 1990s and early 2000s saw quite a mix of winners, with Ronaldo, Raúl, and Samuel Eto’o being the only players to receive the award twice. Suddenly, defenders in Spain had a new nightmare to contend with, the likes of which nobody had ever seen, when Barcelona debuted Lionel Messi in 2004.
Everybody knew what a great prospect Messi was, but even the most optimistic fans wouldn’t believe what he’d go on to achieve. The diminutive Argentine became La Liga’s all-time top scorer and brags 163 goals, more than second place on that list. Messi has won eight Pichichi trophies, and his record may never be broken. For context, from 2009/10 to 2020/21, when he left Barcelona, he scored at least 25 league goals in every campaign.
It would be remiss of us not to mention Cristiano Ronaldo, La Liga’s second top scorer ever, who bagged three Pichichi trophies himself. He was the only person to threaten to take the award off Messi consistently, and, in another era, he’d have undoubtedly had many more to his name, but this is the standard Messi set.
Recent Winners of La Liga Top Goalscorer Award
Spanish football has changed so much over the years but has a fine tradition of boasting foreign talents going back generations when other leagues didn’t adopt a similar approach. The diversity of nationalities fronting the top scorer’s list in Spain is impressive, and talkSPORT BET highlights some of the most spectacular individual seasons as a reminder of individual accomplishments in this beautiful team sport.
Luis Suárez, Barcelona, 2015/16 – 40 Goals
This season was particularly noteworthy because it was the only occasion over a 12-year span where Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t win the Pichichi trophy. However, Luis Suárez thoroughly deserved the award this campaign because of his lethal finishing. The Uruguayan got Barcelona over the line by one point to win the league and upset the Messi-Ronaldo apple cart, at least for a year.
Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2014/15 – 48 Goals
CR7 scored five more than Messi this season, but even that couldn’t propel Real Madrid to a title win in the 2014/15 campaign. Nonetheless, it was a frankly ludicrous tally from the Portugal star who claimed his third La Liga top goalscorer award and cemented his place in Spanish folklore forever.
Lionel Messi, Barcelona, 2011/12 – 50 Goals
Imagine a season where somebody scores 46 league goals and isn’t the division’s top scorer. Unfortunately for Cristiano Ronaldo, this was his reality because of one man: Lionel Messi. Without even a hint of hyperbole intended, this must go down as the greatest domestic goalscoring campaign ever. Considering the standard of this Barcelona team and that Real Madrid even won the league title by nine points, Messi kept his side alive and must’ve wondered what else he could’ve done.
Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2010/11 – 40 Goals
Nobody had yet achieved what Cristiano Ronaldo accomplished in this campaign: netting 40 times in a league season. In only his second La Liga season, he made history by becoming the greatest single-season goalscorer to this point. Yet again, the top scorer in the division had to settle for his team finishing second in the league table, but this was a nice consolation.
As we’ve discussed, the goal tallies in other leagues appear to pale in comparison to Spain, which can arguably boast itself as a pioneer of international talent and goalscoring records. To get the latest odds on Spanish football, check out the talkSPORT BET website. Before placing your bets, check out the talkSPORT BET offers to seek more value for your stake.
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