Raphinha Barcelona: 12 Goals, Messi Comparison and the European Test Ahead
Raphinha's Barcelona Start Surpasses Messi's Best LaLiga Run
Raphinha scored all three of Barcelona's goals in a 3-1 win at Sevilla on September 19 right foot, then a header, then a finish with his left, a hat-trick that ran through every method available to him. It was his second straight treble, coming five days after another one against Racing Santander, and the numbers behind it have moved past the point where comparing him to Lionel Messi is a joke.
He has scored twelve goals in seven La Liga games and has provided three assists. His team has won all the games, is six points ahead of Real Madrid, and has not conceded more than once in each of these games. Raphinha is doing this while being the captain of Barcelona, the first Brazilian player to take up this role permanently, and while operating from a position that he is not entirely comfortable with – that of Hansi Flick’s center forward. Raphinha did not reach this position on purpose. Robert Lewandowski went to Chicago Fire, and Ferran Torres went to PSG. Flick needed a No. 9 and turned to his winger instead.
Six goals were scored in the first four games of the La Liga season by Barcelona; two goals were scored against Elche, one against Athletic Bilbao, two against Rayo Vallecano, and one against Valencia. As recorded by Mundo Deportivo, six goals in four La Liga games have been scored by a player twice in this century; the other player to score in such form was Messi in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons.
Cristiano Ronaldo's best four-game starts topped out at five. Add the Champions League and, through five matches, Raphinha had eight a brace against Feyenoord in a 5-1 win took him there which is more than any Barcelona player has scored that early since Sándor Kocsis got nine in 1958-59, and made him the first player since Luis Suárez that same season to score in each of a team's first five games. Nine goals through six league matches matched a mark Messi last hit in 2017-18. Then came Sevilla, and twelve through seven.
Raphinha's 12 LaLiga Goals Put Him Ahead of Messi
That last one is where the comparison actually flips. Messi's best pure La Liga start, measured strictly in league goals through seven games, was eleven, set in 2017-18 and now Raphinha boasts more goals than Messi has ever achieved at the same point in the season.
Going even further into history, only two players have done better in La Liga: Echevarría with 14 goals for Real Oviedo in 1943-44, and Ronaldo with 13 goals for Real Madrid in 2014-15. Raphinha's 12 goals match four other players, one of whom is Mariano Martín of Barcelona, who scored his club record 12 in 1943-44.
Why Raphinha's 2026 Numbers Cannot Be Compared Directly With Messi's 91 Goals
This is the true record, not an artificial one, which is the reason why 91 has made its way into the conversation.
Lionel Messi scored 91 goals in 2012 50 for Barcelona and 41 for Argentina. He surpassed Gerd Müller's 85, set in 1972, a record which had stood for forty years. Seventy-nine of these 91 goals were scored for Barcelona 59 in La Liga, 13 in the Champions League, five in Copa del Rey, two in the Spanish Super Cup and twelve for Argentina, all in 69 appearances and a goal almost every 66 minutes, nine of them hat-tricks. It is still the most any player has scored for both his club and his country in one year. However, comparing this record to Raphinha's performance requires an honest recognition of its nature.
Messi's 91 wasn't a fast start to anything. It ran through the back half of the 2011-12 season and the front half of 2012-13 two different squads, stitched together only because they both fell inside the same twelve months. He'd already scored 27 goals for Barcelona before that calendar year even began. What became 91 was the continuation of a level a 24-year-old had been playing at for years, at what might be the highest individual scoring peak the sport has produced, not a September that needed extrapolating out.
Raphinha's own 2026 tells a different story once you look at the half of it that isn't currently happening. His 2025-26 season which covers the first six months of this calendar year was wrecked by 125 days out with hamstring trouble, and his goal contributions fell to 29, down from 60 the year before, when he finished fifth for the Ballon d'Or.
Whatever his full calendar-year total ends up being once that stretch is added in, it isn't within reach of 91, because a good chunk of the year went to injury rather than goals. What he's doing this month is real. It doesn't mean the year adds up.
It's worth running the numbers on just the season ahead of him, if only to see how far 91 sits from anything plausible. He has 12 league goals with 31 matches left. Thirty for the season is 18 more, well under his current rate. Fifty matching what Messi scored in La Liga in that same 2011-12 campaign is 38 more, or 1.23 a game, a clear drop-off from where he is now but a serious pace to hold for seven months.
Seventy would need 1.87 a game the rest of the way, faster than he's currently scoring, with no slump and no injury. None of that is a prediction. It's just what the pace requires, and it requires more than anyone should expect from one player across a full season, let alone a calendar year built from two of them.
How Barcelona's No. 9 Role Has Transformed Raphinha
The football behind it is more interesting than any of the arithmetic. Flick hasn't turned Raphinha into a target man parked on the last defender. He drops between the lines, drifts wide, and leads the press from the front. Flick has said the pressing has started from the No. 9 for two seasons now, and that Raphinha "has the hunger, desire and mentality" the role demands. His shot numbers back that up: across his first five games this season he had 13 shots, 12 of them on target, one off the post.
That's not a player getting lucky. That's a player finding the right spots and finishing what he gets there. Lamine Yamal has set up several of the biggest goals himself, and Barcelona have conceded just three times in their first six league games, with Pau Cubarsí drawing praise from Flick for his growth at centre-back, a defense solid enough to let the attack play with a lead instead of chasing games.
There's a limit to how far this goes, and none of the reasons for that are anything to hold against him. He's 28, not entering the years Messi was in during 2012. His injury history isn't clean. Brazil duty and the travel that comes with it will interrupt him through the autumn.
Barcelona's fixtures get tougher from here, and opponents who've watched the film will start setting up specifically to close off the space he's been finding between the lines. Gabriel Jesus and Yamal will take some of the scoring load off him, because no manager wants a team that only scores through one man. Seen against all of that, Messi's 91 looks more remarkable, not less. It's a lot easier to appreciate once you've worked out what matching even a piece of it would actually cost.
Barcelona's Champions League Challenge Will Test Raphinha
Barcelona's harder problem this season has nothing to do with any individual's numbers. Thanks to Flick, they have made it to one Champions League semifinal and one quarterfinal where they were knocked out by Inter Milan in 2024-25 and Atlético Madrid in April, as a 2-1 victory in the second leg match played at the Metropolitano stadium was not sufficient after a 2-0 loss at their own stadium. In both these cases, the high defensive line of Flick has been exploited the most, especially the goal scored by Ademola Lookman, which sealed the tie against Atlético Madrid. 20 goals have been conceded by Barcelona in 12 Champions League games last season.
This year's group brings Manchester City, Aston Villa, Como, PSG, Sporting CP, Galatasaray and Sabah, plus Feyenoord, who they beat 5-1 in the opener Raphinha scored twice that night, taking his Champions League total for the club to 21, fifth on Barcelona's all-time list. The trip to Galatasaray on October 13 is one of European football's genuinely hostile away days, and PSG's visit lands right before the first Clásico of the season, a stretch that will tell us more about this team than anything in La Liga has so far.
Barcelona will also go into it without their first-choice goalkeeper. Joan García is out for around three weeks with a meniscus injury picked up against Racing Santander; his deputy, 35-year-old Wojciech Szczesny, already made an error that cost a goal in that same match, and summer signing Dominik Livaković hasn't made his debut yet.
None of that rules Barcelona out. Their attack this season is genuinely historic, the pressing has an identity, and a squad with Yamal, Cubarsí and Raphinha in it isn't short of talent. But this version of Barcelona, the one averaging more than four goals a game in the league, hasn't yet faced a team built to sit in, absorb pressure and hit them on the break the way Inter and Atlético both did or had to grind out a knockout match where the scoreline won't move and somebody has to win ugly. That test starts in October.
Raphinha doesn't need to become Messi for this season to mean something. He's already put together a start no Barcelona player has matched in eighty years, and made a stronger case than most of this year's Ballon d'Or shortlist without needing to say a word about it. What actually decides how 2026-27 gets remembered isn't 91. It's how many of these goals show up in the matches Barcelona have been losing every April.
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