In Barcelona’s 7-0 victory over Osasuna this past Sunday, Lionel Messi achieved another phenomenal feat, becoming the club’s all-time leading scorer in all competitions, including friendlies, with 371 goals.
The man he surpassed in the process was Paulino Alcántara; an almost mythical Filipino-Spanish footballer who awed all of Cataluña throughout the 1910s and ’20s, scoring 369 goals in 357 matches before retiring to become a doctor in 1927.
Alcántara was born in Iloilo City, Philippines on Oct. 7, 1896 to a Spanish military father and ethnic Ilongga mother. The family relocated to Barcelona when he was three; around the same time that Swiss football pioneer Joan Gamper founded FC Barcelona (side note: there is a story that claims the ex-FC Basel captain actually chose the blaugrana colors for the Catalans in honor of his former club.)
Gamper spotted a young Alcántara and signed him as a teenager from local amateur side, FC Galeno. After two years in the youth team, he made his senior debut against Català SC, a club which would fold by 1915. In a 9-0 victory, he scored a hat-trick, in the process becoming the youngest player to feature and score for Barcelona at 15 years, four months and 18 days old (side note #2: Messi is the fourth-youngest, debuting at 17 years, nine months and six days old) as well as the first Asian to play in a competitive European football match.
By the time he finished his first spell at the club in 1916, at the age of 20, Alcántara had led the team to two Catalan league championships (1913, 1916), a Copa del Rey (1913) and two Pyrenees Cups (1912, 1913), an early cross-national competition played between French and Spanish clubs.
Alcántara’s family relocated to the Philippines that same year and the player joined Bohemian Sporting Club. He balanced his time on the field with his studies, signing up for medical school and excelling in both sport and academics during his two-year stay in his birth country. While helping Bohemians to two Philippine Championships in 1916 and 1917, the striker joined up with the national team in time to lead the Filipinos to their greatest ever victory: a 15-2 defeat of Japan at the 1917 Far Eastern Championships.
In the meantime in Spain, Barcelona was struggling to recapture the glory it had experienced with Alcántara in the team and Gamper himself pleaded with the young man’s parents to let him return to Cataluña, which they proved unwilling to do. By a stroke of luck — or lack thereof, depending on which side of the fence you fall — the player contracted malaria and presented his parents with an ultimatum: 1) let him return to Barca and he would take his medication, or 2) deny him permission to return and he would refuse, leaving him at risk of death or serious medical deterioration.
His parents assented and he returned in time to lead the club to another Catalan league championship in 1919. Seven more would follow, along with four Copa del Reys, before he chose to retire in 1927 at the age of 31 to pursue medicine full-time.
Alcántara would go down in Barcelona folklore for his remarkable scoring record and success with the club. Like most players, he had his idiosyncrasies. For instance, tucked in his shorts most matches he would sport a white handkerchief, marking himself out as one of the game’s earliest personalities. Like Messi, he stood only 5 ft. 7, nonathletic in appearance, but possessing the kind of touch and technique that has been seen on very few occasions in professional football.
From 1931-34, he would serve as a club director and in March 2012 the club celebrated the 100-year anniversary of his debut with a friendly match against Sporting Gijón, where Barcelona honored his two granddaughters who remain in the city.
To this day, the Filipino-born icon remains Asia’s greatest every player and was honored as such by FIFA in 2007. Alcántara also bears the honor of being the first and only Asian-born footballer to turn out for and later manage the national team of Spain — the second task he accomplished in 1951, leading La Roja to a win and two draws against Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden in friendlies.
The “Police goal” and “Net-breaker”
Any conversation about Alcántara is incomplete without mention of his two greatest goals — as would be the case if talking about Messi without bringing up his “Goal of the Century” imitation against Getafe in 2007 or the famous Champions League final header in 2009.
His first, known as the “gol del policía”, was scored in a friendly match in April 1919 against Real Sociedad, shortly after the player returned from the Philippines. During that match, Alcántara struck a thunderous shot that was on its way toward goal when a stray policeman wandered onto the pitch and caught the ball’s fury. Needless to say, both the ball and the poor fellow ended up in the back of the net — a feat that has gone unmatched throughout football history.
The second goal was the one that would earn Alcántara his famous nickname “El Romperedes” (Trencaxarxes in Catalan; net-breaker in English). In the second of his five appearances for Spain’s national team in 1922, the striker scored two in what was eventually a 4-0 win over France. But, it was the first of the pair that left the crowd astounded — the Filipino struck the ball with such power that he literally tore a hole through the net.
Below is an official video from Barcelona about Paulino Alcántara
A Peach of a GOAL! 