All eyes turn to the Spotify Camp Nou, which hosts the clash between Barcelona and Deportivo Alavés today, Saturday, in the eleventh round of the Spanish league. The match carries plenty of striking numbers, chief among them the brilliance of Lamine Yamal and Raphinha, set against a scoring curse haunting one of the visitors' most prominent weapons.
The statistics specialists at Opta have pulled together a set of intriguing numbers and facts ahead of the clash, as follows:
- Barcelona star Lamine Yamal has scored 38 goals across 111 Spanish league matches. The only player to outscore him before turning twenty in Europe's big five leagues during the twenty-first century is Kylian Mbappé, who netted 41 goals in 79 matches.
- Raphinha tops the scoring charts in Europe's big five leagues this season with 13 goals. The Barcelona man has reached that figure in just nine matches, equalling his tally for the whole of last season in the Spanish league, when he managed 13 goals across 22 matches.
- Quique Sánchez Flores has failed to win any of his seven previous visits to face Barcelona in the Spanish league. The Deportivo Alavés coach has settled for two draws against five defeats, losing the last four clashes, with the teams he coached failing to find the net in four of those matches.
- Lucas Boyé, the Deportivo Alavés forward and the team's top scorer in the Spanish league this season with five goals, suffers from a scoring curse against Barcelona. He has played eight matches against the Catalan side without scoring. The Argentine forward has no worse record anywhere except against Celta Vigo and Sevilla, having failed to find the net across ten matches against each of them in the Spanish first division.