Lionel Messi's Unwanted Barcelona Record Is Just a Reminder of All He's Achieved

Do not adjust your screens. You’re about to be told something that Lionel Messi has FAILED to do.

For the first time since the 2007/08 season—a time when the mercurial Argentinean’s teammates included Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry and Samuel Eto’o—Messi has failed to score a goal in either one of Barcelona’s opening two La Liga matches of the season. A crisis, right?!

Well, no.

Barca have still won both matches 1-0, relying on Luis Suarez to score the winner at Athletic Bilbao and the unlikely figure of Thomas Vermaelen at home to Malaga on Saturday evening. They are one of four teams on maximum points already, but given that one of those is tiny Eibar, that’s a clear reminder that things aren’t quite what they usually are in Spain at the moment.

Messi will get back to scoring league goals imminently, possibly in Barca’s next match—a huge early-season clash at Atletico Madrid after the international break—and the fact that he’s failed to this time around should really just be a reminder of the staggering highs he’s achieved over the past eight years.

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In fact, that 2007/08 campaign was arguably the last of Messi’s “mortal” seasons.

Aged 20, he scored 10 goals in 28 Liga appearances as he shared forward duties with Eto’o, Ronaldinho, Henry and, yes, Eidur Gudjohnsen in Frank Rijkaard’s team, which would finish third in the table behind Real Madrid and a punching-above-their-weight Villarreal.

From then on, Messi has never failed to score any less than 23 goals in a league campaign—the total he got in 2008/09 before further tallies of 34, 31, 50, 46, 28 and 43 in the six seasons to follow.

There is every probability that we’ll be looking at a similarly impressive number come the end of the 2015/16 season, but if the act of Barcelona winning matches without their main man finding the net isn’t a positive for Luis Enrique, then what is?

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This, remember, is a Barca side that featured Suarez and Neymar scoring 64 goals between them in the treble-winning campaign last year, and although Vermaelen’s weekend strike might turn out to be something of a collector’s item, there are certainly goals elsewhere in the side.

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If the departure of Xavi has taught Barca fans one thing, it is the value of top-quality footballers being allowed to grow old gracefully, whilst Barca have also got plenty of thinking to do about what the role of Messi—who’ll be 29 at the end of this season—will be when he enters his 30s and beyond.

A deep-lying playmaker? Probably not, but it wouldn’t be a leap of faith to suggest that he’ll drop a little deeper in the Barca side, something that we saw at times last season as Suarez and Neymar ran amok in the domestic game and the Champions League—most notably in the semi-final second leg against Bayern Munich.

That is still a long way off, though.

Messi is still Barca’s prime goal-getter regardless of this “drought” eight years in the making that he’ll be determined to end as soon as possible, but it’s little—almost comical—statistics like these that tell you everything you need to know about one of the true greats of the world game.

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It wasn’t for the want of trying that he didn’t find the net against Athletic or Malaga, registering, according to Squawka, four shots in the former game and seven in the latter.

One of those will go in sooner or later, and then he’ll score again and again and again.

He remains a player defined by the superhuman feats he’s capable of, but also by what it is he doesn’t do.

And that, more than anything, tells you all about the level of genius we are currently witnessing.