Barça goal feasts

 
The 2008/09 season will go down in the record books for many reasons, one of them being the 17 goal routs totalling 83 goals that Barça has imposed on their hapless rivals.
This season, Barça has scored 158 goals in 62 matches, a huge total thanks mainly to the large number of goal routs chalked up by Guardiola’s team. Although the manager did his best to play down the frequency of these goal feasts, even he had to accept the evidence of the results – Barça scored more than four goals in 17 different matches this season.

17 goal feasts

Whoever the opponent, whichever the competition, Barça’s philosophy never changed – attack and score. This resulted in 17 goal feasts with more than four goals – 11 in the league, 5 in the Champions League and one in the Cup.

83 goals in 17 matches

In these 17 matches, Barça scored 83 goals. That’s more than half their goals in just over a quarter of the matches. That’s an average of 4.88 goals per match.

From Sporting to Real Madrid

The league, being the competition with the most matches, witnessed 11 of the 17 goal feasts. The first was away to newly promoted Sporting (1-6). That was the start of rich vein of goals that ended in the Santiago Bernabeu with the crushing 2-6 defeat of Real Madrid. In between, team after team was put to the sword: Atlético Madrid, Almería, Malaga (twice), Valladolid, Valencia, Deportivo, Numancia and Sevilla. In total, 56 goals in 11 matches.

Five European routs

Barça played 15 matches in Europe this season, including the qualifier against Wisla, and scored four or more in five of them. Only Shakhtar Donetsk and Manchester United resisted the pressure. The big scores were: Wisla (4-0), Bayern Munich (4-0), Basle (0-5), Sporting Clube (2-5) and Olympique Lyon (4-0).

The Cup Final

Cup Finals are not usually high scoring so no one could predict the result of Barça’s encounter with Athletic Bilbao in Valencia. Despite going behind, Barça hit back with four splendid goals.