He’s a former Iranian footballer, whose career lasted 18 seasons, from 1989 to 2007.
He bagged an amazing 109 international goals in 149 games! This is a 0.73 conversion rate, which is quite impressive. He might have been an excellent scorer.
But this assumption rapidly falls flat when you look at his club statistics. He played a measly 351 games, which is 19.5 games per season. Compared to him, Lione Messi, who’s started his 17th season, has 757 club appearences. And all this with a tally of 134 goals (a 0.38 conversion rate). These give him a total of 243 career goals in 500 games (0.48 conversion rate)… When you compare these stats to those of the best goalscorers in history, it’s quite startling how far behind the Iranian is.
So we have to assume Daei was a subpar, average striker at most. Who’s spent too much time on the bench and who wasn’t that effective infront of the goal. So how do we explain how lethal he was while wearing his national team’s jersey? Things get interesting when we look closely at his opponents.
I used an Excel spreadsheet to estimate all of the following statistics:
So he scored 8 goals against Laos and Maldives. 6 against Lebanon. 5 against Nepal and Sri Lanka. 4 against Bahrain, Guam, Irak, Japan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Syria and Taiwan. 3 against Bosnia, China, Jordan, Tajikistan, Thailand and Uzbekistan. 2 against North Korea. 1 against 13 nations.
In fact, he’s scored a total of 14 goals against teams whose level could be qualified as mid or high: Japan (4), South Korea (4), Bosnia (3), Costa Rica (1), Ecuador (1) and Mexico (1).
You could’ve argued that he was just an exceptional player who was born in the wrong country (I’m talking about the level of football here), surrounded by other weak countries. But his record at club level just doesn’t fit in with that. Therefore, the sad truth is that the player with the most international goals was an average striker, but an excellent one compared to his usual opponents in Asia. Not to mention he didn’t participate in a single World Cup.
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