What the chart shows
The comparison includes the entire 97-club denominator, including 34 clubs with no qualifying goal. The counts below six are 34 clubs at zero, 31 at one, 22 at two, four at three, three at four and one at five. Together they total 95: 95 / 97 × 100 = 97.9% of the comparator clubs. Two clubs scored six and none scored more.
Barcelona is excluded because its six qualifying goals were all scored by Messi. Keeping Barcelona as an opposing comparator would count the same goals on both sides. Juventus and Olympique Lyonnais, labeled Lyon, are the two ties. The highlighted Messi marker represents one player; each other mark represents a club’s combined total.
Men’s Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1, 2017/18. All 97 non-Barcelona clubs, including zero scorers, plus Messi as a separate player reference.
How it was made
Select direct-free-kick goals with free-kick-shot subtype 33, directness tag 1101 and goal tag 101. Requiring directness prevents some indirect routines from entering the total. Aggregate by club across the five domestic leagues, retain zero scorers, exclude Barcelona and add Messi as a separate reference.
The retained audit has 122 qualifying goal events across all clubs, including Barcelona. Its team totals reconcile to the plotted comparison; all six Barcelona rows belong to Messi. The horizontal position is the number of goals. Vertical stacks count clubs, and the order within a stack is arbitrary.
Definitions & limits
- This is a comparison of player and club goal totals in 1,826 league matches across five competitions. It is not a free-kick conversion-rate comparison.
- No adjustment is made for attempts, minutes, match exposure or league strength. Germany schedules 34 league matches per club; the other four leagues schedule 38.
- The 95/97 denominator excludes Barcelona and includes every other club, including those with zero qualifying goals. Messi’s reference marker is not an additional club.
- The result describes provider-coded direct-free-kick goals in 2017/18, with no current, career or all-time claim.
Original sources & reuse
- Wyscout / Pappalardo & Massucco (2019), Events, fixed version 1
- Pappalardo et al. (2019), public soccer match-event data paper
- Pappalardo et al. (2019), PlayeRank, requested collection citation
- Underlying data licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
- Wyscout free-kick-shot definition
Data: Wyscout / Pappalardo & Massucco (2019), Figshare, CC BY 4.0. Data paper: Pappalardo et al. (2019).
Meplar filtered free-kick events by subtype and directness/goal tags, aggregated team and player totals, retained all zero-scoring clubs, excluded Barcelona to avoid the overlapping reference, and visualized the complete club distribution. No source endorsement is implied.
This analysis uses the fixed Events version 1 release. A source retrieval date is not documented for this page. The checks reconcile supplied derivative tables and selected event audits; they do not constitute a new audit of the full raw event archive.