Thanks to the victory at Mestalla with a goal from Robert Lewandowski in added time, Barcelona’s coach, Xavi Hernández, managed to equalize this Saturday, the record of 87 points in the first 38 games of the League leading the Barça team that Pep Guardiola achieved.
The current Barça coach has added 87 points out of a possible 114 since he began managing the Catalan squad in November 2021. This figure is also the same as ‘Tata’ Martino achieved in this stretch of matches and is only exceeded by 90 points from Helenio Herrera, 93 from Ernesto Valverde, 94 from Luis Enrique and 100 from Tito Vilanova.
The score achieved by Xavi, on the other hand, is higher than Bobby Robson’s 81, Johan Cruyff’s 80 and Ronald Koeman, Terry Venables and Josep Samitier’s 79, according to data expert Alexis Martín-Tamayo, better known as MisterChip, on his Twitter account.
These numbers allowed Barcelona to finish in second position in the last league championship after Xavi took the team in ninth place in November 2021. And, this year, the 31 points he accumulates in the first 12 days place him as provisional leader waiting for Real Madrid to play their match against Girona this Sunday.
The Barça season received its first big disappointment last Wednesday with the early elimination from the Champions League, but things are going very differently in the domestic competition, in which Xavi’s team has been solid except for the ‘Clasico ‘ at the Santiago Bernabeu against Real Madrid (3-1), the only defeat suffered so far.
Proof of this is that Marc-André Ter Stegen has only conceded goals in 2 of the 12 games played (against Real Madrid and Real Sociedad), which has allowed him to achieve a new record: being the first goalkeeper in history to leave a clean sheet in 10 of the first 12 days of the Spanish League.
Previously, the German goalkeeper had already managed to break his unbeaten record in the league with Barça, which he set in 636 minutes, which elapsed between Alexander Isak’s goal on matchday 2 and Karim Benzema’s on matchday 9.
Before the break for the World Cup, in addition to Tuesday’s inconsequential Champions League match against Viktoria Pilsen, Barça will have to face two other matches in the domestic competition: on November 5 against Almería at the Spotify Camp Nou and on November 8 November against Osasuna in El Sadar.
