Since 1929, Spanish football has crowned a top scorer almost every season. The award even has its own name, the Pichichi Trophy. Winning it places a player among the greats of the Spanish game. This guide explains the history of La Liga top scorers, where the trophy’s name comes from, and the players who have dominated it.
La Liga top scorers: where the name Pichichi comes from
The trophy is named after Rafael Moreno Arandía, a forward for Athletic Club in the 1910s and early 1920s. Everyone called him Pichichi. He was one of the first genuine stars of Spanish football. In 1913, he scored the first goal ever at San Mamés, Athletic’s stadium.
Pichichi died young, in 1922, at the age of 29. In 1953, the Spanish newspaper Marca created an annual award for La Liga’s top scorer. It named the award in his honour. A bronze bust of his likeness still sits pitchside at San Mamés today.
Lionel Messi: La Liga’s top scorer of all time
No player has won the Pichichi more often than Lionel Messi. He took the award eight times with Barcelona, a tally far beyond any other player in the trophy’s history overall. His best single season came in 2011–12, when he scored 50 league goals. That total still stands as the record for a single La Liga campaign.
Messi also holds the record for the most La Liga goals in a career, with 474. He scored every one of them for Barcelona, across 17 seasons.
Cristiano Ronaldo
During his time at Real Madrid, from 2009 to 2018, Cristiano Ronaldo won the Pichichi three times. His 2014–15 season saw him score 48 league goals. That remains one of the highest single-season totals in the competition’s history.
The Messi-Ronaldo rivalry defined the Pichichi race for most of the 2010s. One of the two finished as top scorer in nine of the ten seasons between 2009–10 and 2018–19.
Before Messi and Ronaldo
Earlier generations produced their own great goalscorers. Telmo Zarra, another Athletic Club forward, won the Pichichi six times in the 1940s and 1950s. He long held the record for most goals in La Liga history, until Messi passed him. His exploits helped cement the award’s prestige for generations to come.
Hugo Sánchez, a Mexican forward who played for Real Madrid in the 1980s, won the Pichichi five times. He once scored 38 goals in a single season, a European record at the time.
Recent La Liga top scorers
Since Messi’s departure from Barcelona in 2021, the race for the Pichichi has opened up. Robert Lewandowski won it after joining Barcelona in 2022. He scored over 20 league goals in his first season in Spain. A younger generation of forwards, at both Barcelona and Real Madrid, now competes for the trophy each year.
How the Pichichi is decided
The rules are simple. Whichever player scores the most goals in La Liga matches across a single season wins the Pichichi. Goals in cup competitions or Europe do not count, only those scored in league matches. If two or more players finish level, they share the award.
Why La Liga top scorers matter
The race for the Pichichi gives every league weekend an extra storyline, on top of the fight for the title itself. It also creates a clear, simple way to compare eras. A striker in the 1950s and a striker today are judged by exactly the same number: goals scored in a season.
To learn more about how the league itself works, read our guide to the La Liga format, or find the latest scoring charts on the official La Liga website. You can also browse more La Liga guides.