Paulino Alcantara: the Filipino star who was Barcelona’s original Lionel Messi
- Philippine footballer key to club’s ‘first golden era’ was named Asia’s greatest ever player by Fifa in 2007
- More than a century on from his debut hat-trick he remains Barcelona’s youngest player and scorer
When Lionel Messi scored the second of his hat-tricks against Osasuna on March 16, 2014, the 26-year-old became Barcelona’s leading scorer.
The 369-goal mark he overtook had stood for decades but despite all the illustrious goalscorers who had played for the Blaugrana over the years – Mariano Martin, Cesar, Laszlo Kubala, Romario, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Samuel Eto’o and Luis Suarez among them – the name of the previous record holder will have been unfamiliar to many.
Paulino Alcantara was the player in question and it was a record he had held for almost 90 years.
The club’s statisticians had him down as scoring a total of 142 goals in official matches and 227 goals in friendlies, but he may have scored even more – elsewhere on the club’s official website it said that Alcantara “was the Club's top goalscorer with 395 goals in 399 games before he was finally overtaken by Leo Messi”.
It was fitting that another diminutive forward who had broken through as a teenager would take Alcantara’s record, whatever it might actually be. Alcantara was a star player in the early days of the club and shone from his debut against Catala SC on February 25, 1912, aged 15 years, four months and 18 days.
Alcantara scored a hat-trick that day, the first three goals in a 9-0 win. “Those were early days for the game, and there were only about a hundred people there to witness the incredible sight of this tiny child able to shoot the ball with such immense power,” according to the club website.
