A fifth goal, in the only place he ever scores them
Marcos Llorente opened the scoring at Anfield on Wednesday and lost anyway. Liverpool turned the Champions League opener around to win 2-1, Alexis Mac Allister finishing the comeback, and Atletico Madrid left with nothing for the third time in three visits.
Llorente left with a statistic that keeps getting stranger. That was his fifth Champions League goal against Liverpool. He has ten in the competition in total.
The pattern started in the 2019-20 round of 16, when he came off the bench at Anfield and scored twice in extra time to send Atletico through 4-2 on aggregate. Last season he scored both of his side’s goals in the same stadium, and Liverpool still won 3-2 through a Virgil van Dijk header in added time. Wednesday made it five goals across five meetings.
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Six shots, five goals
The conversion rate is the part that does not look real. Llorente has taken six shots against Liverpool in the Champions League and scored five of them, a return of 83 percent. Against every other opponent he has faced in the competition, 54 matches in total, he has scored five goals from 44 attempts. That is 11 percent.
He is not a forward. He started his career as a defensive midfielder and has spent most of it as a wing-back or a runner from deep, which is why the record stands out among the players who have built up double-figure tallies in this competition. Of everyone with ten or more Champions League goals, Llorente is the only one who has scored at least half of them against a single opponent. The next closest are Sebastien Haller, with five of his twelve against Sporting CP, Anthony Gordon with four of ten against Qarabag, and Luiz Adriano with eight of twenty-one against BATE Borisov.
Where it sits in the record books
The overall record for goals against one club in the Champions League belongs to Cristiano Ronaldo, who scored ten against Juventus. Against Liverpool specifically, only Karim Benzema has more than Llorente, with seven in eight games. Llorente now sits level with Vinicius Junior on five.
All of his came at Anfield, which puts him in a group of eight players who have scored five or more against a team at one away ground. Only two have managed six there: Ronaldo against Ajax at the Johan Cruijff ArenA, and Robert Lewandowski against Crvena Zvezda at the Rajko Mitic Stadium.
UEFA introduced a rule this season stopping clubs from meeting in three consecutive league phases, so Liverpool are safe from the fixture next year. The knockout rounds remain open.
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