What is a goal? It seems like a fairly basic question, the sort of thing football should have sorted out by now. But as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’s goal-scoring feats have challenged records that for a long time seemed beyond reach, it turns out that those marks were never quite so established as they had appeared.
These days, we have a fairly clear idea of what constitutes an official game and goals scored in one. If you’re playing for Barcelona or Real Madrid, it’s a goal in La Liga, the Copa del Rey, the Supercopa, the Champions League, the Europa League, the UEFA Super Cup or the FIFA Club World Cup. Nothing else at the club level counts—not friendlies, not the International Champions Cup, nothing. For a national team, it’s the World Cup and continental championships (and their qualifiers), Nations League competitions and official friendlies against other nations.
It's at this point that an immediate contradiction emerges: Why does a friendly for Portugal, for instance, count, while one for Juventus doesn’t? It’s easy to mock the fact that Pelé’s "unofficial" tally includes hundreds of goals in friendlies, but while some of those games were exhibitions against substandard opposition, some, when Santos toured Europe, were matches of the very highest quality, taken extremely seriously.
It doesn’t help credibility when Santos’s statisticians suddenly discover a load of new goals just as Messi draws level with Pelé or Slavia Prague’s historians decide another batch of goals were actually in official games just as Ronaldo supposed surpassed Josef "Pepi" Bican. But the fact is that comparing across eras is all but impossible, particularly when one of the players involved in the comparison, Bican, played for three national sides.
In January, Ronaldo reached 760 career goals for club and country: five goals for Sporting, 118 for Manchester United, 450 for Real Madrid, 85 for Juventus and 102 for Portugal. That seemed to have taken him past Bican’s apparent record of 759–but others, including FIFA, have Bican on 805. And even more have come up with their own totals. The fact is, wherever you draw the line, it’s arbitrary. And that’s perhaps especially true of somebody who played in such a turbulent period as Bican. In a sense, the precise total is of largely academic interest; more relevant is that he was a very great footballer and a very great goalscorer and somebody who, in part because of his courage and stubbornness, lived a remarkable life.
