ALL MESSI CLUB GOALS - DATA ANALYSIS

6 min readApr 4, 2023

Hi everyone! Welcome to My Data Analysis project using Excel & Tableau.

Introduction

Firstly, the reason why I chose this project was because of my likeness for Messi as a person and footballer.

Lionel Andrés Messi (born 24 June 1987), also known as Leo Messi, is an Argentine professional footballer who plays as a forward for and captains both Major League Soccer club Inter Miami CF and the Argentina national team. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, Messi has won a record eight Ballon d’Or awards, a record six European Golden Shoes, and in 2020 was named to the Ballon d’Or Dream Team. Until leaving the club in 2021, he had spent his entire professional career with Barcelona, where he won a club-record 34 trophies, including ten La Liga titles, seven Copa del Rey titles and four UEFA Champions Leagues. With his country, he won the 2021 Copa América, the 2022 Finalissima, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

I downloaded the dataset from Kaggle. The dataset contains information about all Messi club goals at professional level from 2005– till date. The dataset contains 729 rows and 16 columns. Each row represents Messi’s club goal scoring details.

The columns are:

· Game_ID — Unique number for each Matchday

· Season — The Matchday Season

· Competition — Name of the Competition

· Matchday — Matchday no

· Date — Date of the event

· Date_in_year — Date of the event in year

· Date_in_month — Date of the event in month

· Venue — Home / Away / Neutral

· Club — Club name

· Opponent — Opponent Club name

· Goal_no — Goal no

· Result — Match Score

· Playing Position — The position played (CF/RW/LW/SS/AM)

· Minute — Minute played

· Type — Type of Goal Scored.

· Goal_assist — The name of the player (assister)

The dataset was a bad data when downloaded. I made used of Excel to organize, clean, analysis the dataset.

Data Cleaning and Integrity

· Data Formatting.

· Remove Duplicates and Blank (unnecessary) data.

· Excel Functions & Formulas: I used “text()” function to convert the matchday date to date in year & month format. “Trim()” function to remove leading and trailing blank spaces and many more.

· Sorting & Filtering Data

QUESTIONS SOLVED — ANALYTICALLY

The questions I answered during the data analysis are:

1. Club goals scored per season in all competition.

2. Club goals scored (yearly).

3. Club goals scored per month.

4. Club goals scored per club.

5. Club goals scored per season in La Liga.

6. Hat trick stats by competition (yearly).

7. Goals scored in UCL (UEFA Champions League) stages.

8. Club goals scored by Venue

9. Top 10 Favorite Opponents

ANALYSIS — Using Pivot table & Excel Functions

1. Club goals scored per season in all competition.

Using COUNTIFS function (COUNTIFS()) to get the number of goals scored in each competition per season.

Takeaway: The 2011/2012 season is his highest goal scoring season while 2005/2006 is his lowest goal scoring season. La Liga is the competition with the most goals which he holds the records for most goals scored in La Liga (474).

2. Club goals scored (yearly)- using pivot table

Takeaway: 2012 is his highest club goal scoring year (79), which he later breaks a Guinness World Record of 91 goals for club & country in a calendar year. 2005 is his lowest club goal scoring year. There is decrease in goals scored from 2016 — till date.

3. Club goals scored per month — using pivot table

Takeaway: March is his highest club goal scoring month while July and June are his lowest club goal scoring month.

4. Club goals scored per club - using pivot table

Barcelona:

Takeaway: 2012 is his highest club goal scoring year for Barcelona (79), 2005 is his lowest club goal scoring year for Barcelona (3).

PSG :

Inter Miami:

5. Club goals scored per season in La Liga

Using COUNTIF function (COUNTIF()) to get the number of goals scored in La Liga per season.

Takeaway: The 2011/2012 season is his highest goal scoring season in La Liga (50).

6. Hat-trick stats by competition (yearly) — using pivot table

Takeaway: La Liga is the competition with the highest hat trick goal rate (36). Supercopa is the competition with the lowest hat trick goal rate. 2012 is the year with the highest hat-trick goal rate (7). Messi last club hat-trick goal was in 2020.

7. Goals scored in UCL (UEFA Champions League) stages.

Using COUNTIF function (COUNTIF()) to get the number of scored in each UCL stages per season.

Pivot table:

Takeaway: The 2011/2012 season is his highest goal scoring season in UCL (14). Group Stage is his highest goal scoring stage in the competition.

8. Club goals scored by Venue — using pivot table

Takeaway: Home venue has the highest percentage of goal scoring venue.

9. Top 10 Favorite Club Opponents — using pivot table

Takeaway: Messi’s most favorite opponent is Sevilla FC — scored 38 goals against them.

DASHBOARD — Using Tableau

Tableau is used to create an interactive dashboard that visualize all Messi club goals across various competitions from his professional year 2005 till date.