La Liga's best goals-per-90 records since 2000

Scan the clubs column and the concentration is immediate. Spanish football through this period ran a structural imbalance more extreme than England's: two clubs with revenues far beyond the rest of the division, playing in a league where the bottom half was often genuinely part-time by comparison. A striker at either of those clubs was taking shots in games his side spent dominating from the eighth minute.

That is the honest context for the rates at the top, and stating it does not diminish them — scoring at better than a goal a game for the better part of a decade is remarkable in any circumstances, and plenty of other forwards had the same service and did not come close. But it does mean a direct comparison with a Premier League rate is a comparison of two different tasks.

It also explains why the list below the top few is more interesting than the top. The players who managed a high rate without that service are the ones whose numbers required something unusual.

The dataset begins in 2000/01 for Spain, which removes a great deal of La Liga history from this table. Whole careers that belong in any honest all-time conversation are simply outside the window, and any claim that starts "the best scoring rate in La Liga history" is overstating what is here by several decades.

This is worth being pedantic about because it is the most common way football statistics mislead. The number is accurate; the frame around it is doing work the data does not support. A table covering twenty-five seasons is a table covering twenty-five seasons, and calling it all-time is a choice somebody made rather than something the figures said.

Every page on this site states the seasons it covers directly under the table for exactly this reason.

The temptation with two rate tables side by side is to conclude that one league's strikers were better than the other's. Resist it. Different leagues distribute chances differently, defend differently, and — crucially over this period — had different degrees of competitive balance, and a rate is sensitive to all three.

What you can say is that the ceiling was higher in Spain during this period, and that is genuinely interesting on its own. It is a statement about what the best possible situation in each league allowed, not about the typical quality of a forward in either.

If you want the version of this argument that actually settles something, look at the players who did both. There are not many, and their numbers in each league are the only controlled comparison available.

Even that comparison needs handling carefully, because the players who moved between the two leagues did not do so at random. They tended to move at a particular point in a career — either arriving in their prime at a bigger club, or leaving one league in their thirties for a different kind of role. So a player whose rate fell after moving may have been declining anyway, and one whose rate rose may simply have joined a better team. It is the cleanest comparison available and it is still not clean.

The comparison people should be making instead is within a league and across eras, where at least the surrounding conditions are broadly shared. That version of the question — who was the most efficient forward in this competition over these twenty-five years — is one this table answers cleanly, and it is a better question anyway.

What the table does support, unambiguously, is a statement about the top of each distribution. Two players sustained better than a goal per ninety minutes across several thousand minutes each in the same league in the same period, and nothing in the Premier League data over a longer window comes close to that. Whatever the explanation, the fact itself is not in doubt.