Messi breaks Pele's record for most goals scored for a single club

Lionel Messi stands alone as the most prolific one-club scorer in football history, breaking a tie with Pele on Tuesday with his 644th goal for Barcelona in all competitions.

Messi moved clear of the Brazilian icon with a tidy finish in the second half against Real Valladolid. The 33-year-old collected teammate Pedri’s backheel flick and fired into the bottom corner to give Barcelona a 3-0 win, moving them up to fifth place in La Liga.

Pele, who starred for Santos from 1956-74, scored 643 times in 665 competitive matches to set the record. Messi, meanwhile, needed 749 games to establish the new high.

Gerd Muller, a World Cup winner and Bayern Munich legend, had come closest to overtaking Pele, scoring 570 goals from 1964-79.

Fernando Peyroteo, who played for Sporting Lisbon from 1937-49, ranks fourth with 569 goals. Josef Bican, who represented Slavia Prague from 1937-48, is fifth with 542.

Messi set the benchmark amid a season of relative struggle by his lofty standards. With 11 goals and three assists in his opening 19 matches, the Argentine has endured his worst start to a season since 2007-08, when he was 20 years old and plagued by injuries.

He admitted that his attempts to leave Barcelona in the summer had weighed on him and affected his form.

“Everything that happened before the summer, how the season ended, then the burofax and everything else … I dragged everything into the start of the season a bit,” Messi said recently. “The truth is right now I’m feeling fine but in the summer I had a very bad time.”

Messi tied Pele’s record on Saturday against Valencia with a rare header – his first in La Liga in more than three years.