Lionel Messi becomes the first player to score 350 La Liga goals

There are very few records left for Lionel Messi to break. He’s mostly competing against himself in individual honors, trying to set marks that can’t be touched by anyone who comes after him. The La Liga goalscoring record is no exception.

Messi has been La Liga’s all-time leading scorer for a few years now — the previous record was held by Telmo Zarra, with 251 career goals. On Saturday, Messi became the first player in La Liga history to reach the 350 goal mark.

Leo went on to score one more goal in Barcelona’s 2-0 win over Alaves, bringing his all-time league tally up to 351.

Currently, La Liga’s second all-time leading scorer is, as you can probably guess, Cristiano Ronaldo. Real Madrid’s legendary superstar passed Zarra last season and currently sits on 285 goals. Because he’s two years older than Messi — and became a first-choice player at a slightly younger age — Ronaldo’s chances of reaching his rival are minimal. It’s Messi vs. himself.

Of course, Ronaldo hasn’t spent all of his prime years in La Liga. He actually has a better goal-scoring rate in the league than Messi — 1.08 goals per game to Messi’s 0.91 goals per game. But Messi’s scoring rate is still better than Zarra’s, and better than every other prolific La Liga scorer as well. Only Ronaldo betters him. The only other player in La Liga’s top 25 scorers who is still active within the league is Aritz Aduriz, who only scores 0.39 goals per game.

The scoring rates of other modern stars shows just how dominant Messi and Ronaldo are: Raúl scored 0.41 goals per game, David Villa netted 0.53 goals per game, and Samuel Eto’o recorded 0.58 goals per game.

By now, you’ve probably heard enough about the greatness of Lionel Messi. But every time he hits a new major individual milestone, it becomes clear just how incredible his career is. It wouldn’t be surprising if no one ever matched his records.