Benzema beats Benzema

Benzema is more and more. The Frenchman registers, at 34 years old, the best goalscoring numbers of his career. 34 years, 34 goals. With his double in Vigo, the madridista striker has had the best season of his career. The best Karim ever. He has needed a whole decade to beat himself. His ceiling was in the 32 goals he scored in 2011-12, Mourinho’s second season. The attacker has touched that record since Cristiano Ronaldo left: 30 goals last year, 27 the previous one, another 30 in the first year without the Portuguese. The one who was the Portuguese’s best squire is now the whites’ best weapon: he has scored 121 goals since the departure of the last great 7 White. Benzema has scored more goals this year (34 goals) than the last two seasons combined (31 goals) in which he accompanied the Portuguese.

The numbers may remain small, because Madrid still have between 10 and 13 games ahead of them, depending on how far Ancelotti’s team go in the Champions League. At his current pace (he averages a goal every 87 1/2 minutes), he’ll be well past forty… The 24 goals he has scored in the League make him caress his first Pichichi in Spain. He was already Ligue 1’s top scorer in 2007-08, a campaign in which he only needed 20 goals to win the award. He now has a ten-goal advantage over his pursuers: Enes Unal, De Tomás and his teammate Vinicius. A difficult difference to wipe away. AND a scoring harvest with which he would opt for the Golden Boot for the best scorer in the European leagues if it were not for the fact that the rival to beat is a Lewandowski whose voracity has led him to add 31 goals in 28 days of the Bundesliga.

History of Madrid and the League

In a season of records, Benzema has risen to the podium of top scorers in the history of Real Madrid after climbing two steps in a few months. In October, against Shakhtar, he surpassed Santillana’s 290 goals and a few weeks ago, with his hat-trick to PSG, evicted Di Stéfano from the podium and the 308 goals scored by The Blonde Arrow. Karim is already at 313 and threatens, this same campaign, the 323 that Raúl credits in second place in the ranking. Cristiano’s 450 goals are big words, far away on the horizon.

The 9 Blanco is the ninth all-time top scorer in the League. A classification in which this same edition has exceeded the 195 of World and the 212 of Pahiño. He has 216. His immediate objective is Quini’s 218 and the next, Cesar’s 221. Di Stéfano scored 227 and Raúl marks the entrance to the top-5 with 228 points.

Vital for Ancelotti’s team

Benzema has played 26 of the 30 games for Madrid in this League and has added 2,148 minutes in the championship, 79.6% of the possible. His goals are golden. Only nine of the 24 that he has marked have been facing the gallery. The French striker’s other 15 goals have contributed to changing the game at that time (in seven games he has opened the scoring and in three others he has been the first Real Madrid player to score) or to add points. Without Benzema’s goals, the leader of the League would not be and would have 15 points less.

In addition to the 24 league goals, he scored another two in the Super Cup (one in the semi-final against Barça and another in the final against Athletic) and eight goals in Champions. It is also his highest scoring campaign in the highest continental competitionwhere he had his ceiling in the seven goals of that 2011-12 season that is increasingly behind in time and in Benzema’s records.