Player Focus: The Longest Player Scoring Streaks Revealed
As far as remarkable starts to the season are concerned, from an individual perspective at least, one need look no further than the Bundesliga and indeed the weekend's showdown between big hitters Bayern and Borussia Dortmund.
Pep Guardiola's side may have secured what is becoming an increasingly familiar comfortable victory, building the largest points gap (7) at the top of the table after 8 matches in Bundesliga history, but players for both sides continued their outstanding scoring streaks.
Indeed, Sunday's match-up boasted Europe's top three scorers come the final whistle, with braces for Bayern's Thomas Muller and Robert Lewandowski taking their respective tallies to 8 and 12 after just 8 league matches. Heading into the international break the two players have scored more goals combined (20) than 95 of the 98 teams in Europe's top 5 leagues.
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While the Polish striker's exploits continue to stun, now netting 12 goals in his last 315 minutes of action for the German champions (more than once every half an hour), Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang's strike for the visitors - though ultimately a consolation - ensured the Gabon striker has scored in his first 8 league matches of the season. The 26-year old's first half strike was his 10th goal in the Bundesliga this season and actually the 10th consecutive league game in which he has netted, having scored in his final two appearances last season.
Aubameyang's brace against Darmstadt at the end of last month meant that he became the first player ever to score in 7 successive matches in any one Bundesliga season, before extending that streak last time out. However that record only considers consecutive matches, rather than consecutive appearances wherein a player might have missed out on the starting XI for one reason or another.
In this piece we look at the players that have scored in the most successive league appearances since the start of the 2009/10 season, with Aubameyang still with some way to go in order to come out on top in Germany, let alone Europe's top 5 leagues.
At the top of the pile in that respect - perhaps unsurprisingly so - is Lionel Messi, who notched in 21 consecutive La Liga appearances in 2012/13. The Argentine set the ball rolling with a brace in a 4-2 win over Mallorca in November, netting in each of his 20 league appearances thereafter, ending in a 2-1 win at Atletico in May the following year – his last league appearance of the season - with Thibaut Courtois the first La Liga keeper to keep Messi at bay in over 7 months.
The aforementioned Lewandowski is Messi's closest challenger in the last 7 seasons, scoring in 12 consecutive Bundesliga appearances for Dortmund in 2012/13. The Polish international started that run in a 3-1 victory over Hoffenheim ahead of the winter break and began the following year in spectacular fashion, scoring in each of his Bundesliga appearances before failing to do so against Fortuna Dusseldorf at the end of April. What kept Lewandowski from a shot at the record Aubameyang recently broke was a two-game absence against Frankfurt and Gladbach in February.
In terms of scoring in the most consecutive appearances at the start of the season, Aubameyang still has three to go to match the feats of Cristiano Ronaldo last season. The Portuguese kicked off his 2014/15 campaign with a late goal against Cordoba on the opening day of the season in La Liga and while he missed out on a place in the 4-2 defeat at Real Sociedad the following weekend, Ronaldo scored in 10 successive appearances upon his return to the side. The run ended in a 2-1 win over Malaga at the end of November.
The Dortmund striker will hope to pick up where he left off after the international break then, and actually has previous when it comes to impressive scoring streaks. One of only 9 players to score in 7 or more consecutive league appearances since the start of the 2009/10 campaign, Aubameyang - along with Ronaldo (3 times) and Messi (twice) - is one of only three players to manage the feat more than once.
The 26-year old scored in 7 successive league appearances during his time at former club Saint-Etienne, doing so following the winter break in the 2012/13 Ligue 1 campaign. It was a run that he started in a 3-1 win over Bastia and ended in a 2-2 draw against PSG two months later, in a season that ultimately earned Aubameyang a move to Dortmund that summer.
With Die Schwarzgelben returning to action against Mainz next Friday Aubameyang will hope to extend his scoring streak for the club having notched against the same opponent back in February. However, he still has three games to go to topple Lewandowski's record of 12 successive goalscoring appearances in the Bundesliga, but matching Messi's league streak of 21 from the same season (2012/13) will surely prove to be mission impossible.
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