by Tommaso Adami
On 28th September, 2005, Cristiano Ronaldo was only 20 years old, he had just started his third season at Manchester United and had scored his first ever Champions League goal the previous month. Further south, teenage wonder Lionel Messi was still Barcelona's blossoming number 30, and he would have to wait another four weeks to leave his first mark in the competition.
Nobody could've seen history unfold the way it did for those two, who would not only grow to become the best footballers of their generation, but also the symbols of the world's most prestigious club football tournament. Respectively sitting at 128 and 114 Champions League goals, Ronaldo and Messi have won the trophy a combined nine times and are certainly the undisputed kings of the Cup.
But before they could take footballing records to unprecedented heights, the man of the Champions League still went by the name of Alfredo Di Stefano, the competition's five-time winner and all-time top scorer with a grand total of 49 goals. Many great players had tried to overtake him, yet nobody had ever managed to break his 41-year-old record. Until a day in late September, 2005...
THE FIRST RECORD BREAKER - At the Santiago Bernabeu, Real Madrid lined up against Olympiacos for their second Champions League game of the season. Having lost their previous fixture 3-0 away at Olympique Lyonnais, Los Blancos were determined to turn things around and clinch a convincing win in front of their fans. But besides longing for the three points, everybody was waiting for a man to rewrite football history.
Madridista born and bred, Raúl González Blanco had recently turned 28 with the reputation of being both a natural born winner and one of Europe's very deadliest strikers. Then at his twelfth year wearing the Real Madrid jersey, Raúl had already been crowned the competition's top goal scorer in two consecutive seasons, proving key in helping his hometown club to lift as many as three Champions League trophies across a five-year span. That night, it took him only nine minutes to score one of his most memorable goals in front of the home crowd.
His header to turn Michel Salgado's golden cross into the opposition's net was surely not his most spectacular, yet that moment crowned Raúl as the most prolific goal scorer in the history of Europe's top club competition. In a way, it felt particularly compelling that it took yet another Blanco to break the record previously set by a legend of the same breed like Di Stefano. But more than anything, this achievement fit the iconic number 7 better than anyone else: despite all the remarkable talent the footballing world teemed with in the early 2000s, Raúl stood as the quintessential definition of centre forward.
THE WORLD'S FAVOURITE STRIKER - "When he plays, in his mind there is only the goal: it's the essence of football", a certain Thierry Henry famously stated when asked about his Real Madrid counterpart. It's difficult to pick one single characteristic that made Raúl so unique and widely appreciated across the footballing world, because most times it felt like he was simply the ideal goal-scoring machine.
Raúl was a natural left-footed striker with a soft spot for perfectly timed dribbles and physic-defying lobs. Often backed up by some of football's greatest midfielders like Fernando Redondo, Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham, he knew how to time a run to perfection and force the defence to chase him down the pitch. When he was alone in front of goal, Raúl gave the best of himself, often dribbling the goalkeeper to cut onto his weaker foot or drawing up unthinkable lobs, leaving the last man to twist his neck in an attempt to follow the impossible trajectory and the recovering defenders to desperately slide into their own goal.
His impeccable control of the ball and overall skill made Real Madrid captain Fernando Hierro nickname him El Ferrari. With impressive consistency throughout his career, Raúl showed time and time again that he simply had it all: great confidence, a gentle first touch, the ability to play off of his teammates and great versatility upfront. In fact, despite being a lefty, he scored a number of right-footed goals, while his innate sense of position and athleticism made him a constant threat for headers. Surely he knew how to be opportunistic in the box, yet he also enjoyed unexpected long distance shots that would elegantly wrap around the diving goalkeeper.
NUMBERS - In 732 games with Real Madrid's first team, El Siete scored 307 goals across all competitions, winning both El Pichichi and the title of Champions League top goal scorer twice. If his mission was that of scoring as much as possible to help his boyhood club win it all, it's safe to say that he comprehensively succeeded.
Raúl left Real Madrid as a club legend in 2010 after having represented his hometown for 16 years. He then joined Schalke 04 and, despite slowly gravitating towards the end of his career, he managed to win two more trophies and add 40 goals to his overall tally. These goals were scored in as little as 98 games, and in his last season in Europe he still managed to score 15 goals in 32 Bundesliga games. At 35, Raúl was putting up the same numbers as when he was 23.
Unfortunately, El Ferrari never managed to collect any silverware with his National team. This doesn't mean that he wasn't able to put up record-breaking numbers for Spain as well, but he retired from international duty in 2006, right before La Roja would begin an unprecedented six-year winning cycle. As of today, Raúl is still the second all-time top goal scorer for the Spanish National team with 44 goals, sitting behind David Villa only (59).
LEGACY - If you followed football in the late Nineties, then you remember just how much Raúl meant to his boyhood club. When Hierro left the team, he became the youngest skipper in Real Madrid history at 26 years of age, continuing to wear the armband and proudly represent Los Blancos until his final game with them. In fact, despite all the world-class footballers that played alongside him at the club, for more than a decade Raúl was the face of Real Madrid, the symbol of Madridismo and a point of reference for every forward around the world.
His elegance and relentlessness stood out especially on Champions League nights, when he knew that the entire world was watching. When the opponents raised the bar, that's exactly when he thrived the most, turning every touch of the ball into a potential, game winning play. Before CR7 and Messi made Di Stefano's European record look like "half an accomplishment", Raúl was the man of the competition. And before Cristiano Ronaldo made that number his trademark, Real Madrid's number 7 jersey could be associated with one player only: Raúl González Blanco, the now immortal wonder boy who accomplished it all with his hometown club.