Ruslan Malinovskyi scored his first Serie A goal of the season on Sunday and it was a stunning strike from outside of the box which, according to OptaPaolo, means that only Lionel Messi (23) has scored more goals from outside the box than Malinovskyi (16) among players in the Big-5 European Leagues since his Serie A debut in 2019.
Not many players have a stat to their name that they can challenge the greatest player of all time on, but Malinovskyi can now boast that. The statistic doesn’t perhaps tell the whole story though.
The Genoa loanee has only scored three league goals in the last two seasons and one of them was just two days ago. He was however on strong goalscoring form between 2019 and 2022. He scored 22 goals in three seasons which carried the weight of his outside of the box goals.
Considering that Lionel Messi leads the metric by some way and he hasn’t played in a top 5 European league for almost six months and Malinovskyi only has three goals in two years, perhaps the main thing that this statistic shows is the lack of outside of the box goals being scored in the top divisions but it also shows how good the ex-Atalanta man is at that art.
Japtej Ghura | GIFN
