Remembering Raúl, still the Champions League’s greatest goalscorer

When he walked from the pitch after his last Champions League game, an unlikely semi-final with Schalke 04 that turned into a curious 4-1 hammering at the hands of Manchester United, Raúl was in possession of two all-time European Cup records: most appearances in the competition proper, and most goals scored. As the second week of the 2014/15 season rolls around, it’s entirely possible he’ll wake up on Thursday in possession of neither.

Being called a pure striker is often a double-edged description, containing within it both praise and confusion. Great strikers are not necessarily great footballers or great athletes; indeed, some great strikers barely look like footballers or athletes at all. Where Cristiano Ronaldo builds his game around his overweening power and physicality, and where everything that is Lionel Messi hangs on that near-mystical dribbling ability, Raúl was an odd player. One who never really looked like much of anything.

He was an odd Real Madrid player, too, at least in terms of what a Real Madrid player is now, all glitz and glamour and staggering cost. A working class kid from Madrid who’d been with the club ever since Atlético’s president, Jesús Gil, decided in his infinite wisdom that his club didn’t need a youth team. The only Galactico whose value to the club wasn’t in some way contingent on a thunderingly massive transfer fee. The only outfield player to ever satisfy both sides of the Zidanes y Pavones theory. A quiet player and quiet man who wanted to do nothing except score goals for Madrid, and who did exactly that.

The fans adored him, voting him the second greatest Madrid player of all time behind Alfredo di Stéfano; as Phil Ball points out in Morbo, this was a poll that judged players not just on their ability but on their “contribution to the madridista cause.” Jorge Valdano, the manager who benched the great Emiliano Butragueño to play the young Raúl, agreed with the people: “If you wrote a list of Raúl’s qualities, it would be a list of the values of Real Madrid. He is the Di Stéfano of our time. He is the people, the incarnation of Madridismo.”

And thanks to all those European goals, everybody else adored him too. His first three Champions League goals came against Ferencváros in October 1995; his last for Madrid came against AC Milan in October 2009; the 71st came for Schalke against Internazionale, in the 2010-11 quarter-finals. He lifted the trophy three times — 1997-98, 1999-00, 2001-02 — and though he only scored twice in that first victorious campaign, he scored ten from fifteen in the second and nine from twelve in the third. Opposition players admired him and opposing managers both coveted and feared him; Alex Ferguson, speaking in 2003 ahead of Madrid’s visit to Old Trafford, claimed that Manchester United would arrange to have him stopped at the border, before going to on to describe him as “the best player in the world”.

That compliment has its roots in an earlier Madrid-United clash, the now-legendary Champions League quarter-final second leg from April 2000. Nil-nil after the first leg at the Bernabéu, Madrid — who were a mess domestically, and who were strong second favourites against a team that was eating the Premier League alive — went to Old Trafford, played with one man in central midfield and a teenager in goal, and emerged the victors by the odd goal in five. Two of those were scored by Raúl, and if any pair of goals neatly encapsulate the kind of player he was, it’s these two.

Playing off his long-term striker partner Fernando Morientes — “waiting like a panther,” said Roy Keane — Raúl’s first came when United, one goal down, messed up an attacking free kick and found themselves unexpectedly outnumbered on the break. Steve McManaman clipped a lateral pass over the heads of the retreating defenders to find Raúl, on his own in the inside left position. After a glorious touch with the outside of his boot, he advances to the edge of the box, where he squares up a scrambling Mikaël Silvestre. Perhaps the defender could have showed him outside, but even allowing for the fact that it’s on his stronger foot, the finish is astoundingly, almost bloodlessly precise. An eighteen-yard curling tap-in, past a well positioned goalkeeper who could do absolutely nothing.

His contribution to the second goal is significantly less spectacular, yet complements the first perfectly. Fernando Redondo’s backheel nutmeg is what sticks in the memory — and quite rightly, for it is completely ridiculous — but it’s Raúl’s clarity of thinking that caps off the goal. United’s players were drawn to the ball like toddlers to a shiny thing; “all the while,” as Rob Smyth put it, “Raúl was waving his hands with the desperation of a man who had seen something nobody else had seen”. He had, of course: he’d seen the right place to stand. If the first goal summed up his ability with the ball, then the second neatly encapsulates his nous without.

The inevitability and seeming ease with which Messi and Ronaldo are going to pass his records — both could well end up with more than 100 — is testament to their ludicrousness, as is the fact that they’re doing it at such speed. Ronaldo’s 68 goals have come from 104 appearances, while Messi’s have come from just 88. And neither, at least not yet, is threatening Gerd Müller’s adorably precise ratio of 35 goals from 35 games. Next to them, Raúl’s record of 71 from 142 — neatly hitting the aspirational one in two that is the measure of all good strikers — seems almost quaint.

But ultimately, Raúl stands as the preeminent goalscorer of the pre-Messi, pre-Ronaldo, pre-Gazprom Champions League, a vague period of time that runs from 1992, when the thing got rebranded and the arguments over who was the best player in the world contained more than two names, and ends some time in the mid-2000s, when the list of elite footballers became him first, him second, and everybody else third and downwards. Others scored fewer, quicker, and two of the greatest ever will score more, but Raúl’s true greatness sits in the combination of his two records. All those goals over all those appearances, the former making him more or less undroppable for most of the latter. Both striker and survivor: not bad for anybody, but remarkable for a Madridista.