Lionel Messi set quite an astonishing record before La Liga's short winter break.

Against Real Valladolid on December 22nd, the Argentine scored Barcelona's third goal in a 3-0 victory, his 644th strike for the Spanish giants.

That means Messi is now the player with the most goals for a single club in football history, eclipsing Pele's tally of 643 with Santos.

It's an outrageous achievement by the Argentine and it begs the question; is the Barcelona legend the greatest goalscorer the game has ever seen?

For many football fans across the world, he is and the 33-year-old has a number of stats to support his claim to the goalscoring throne.

Messi famously notched 91 goals in a calendar year in 2012, as well as rippling the back of the net on 50 occasions during the 2012/13 La Liga season, two astonishing feats.

We can now also add another impressive goalscoring stat to Messi's sizeable collection thanks to data collected by Reddit user Pek-Man.

His study shows that of active players to have scored 100 or more goals in Europe's top five leagues, Messi has the best non-penalty goals-per-game ratio.

The Argentine maestro averages 0.875 of them per match, a far superior record to that of Robert Lewandowski (0.756) in second.

Cristiano Ronaldo has to make do with a fourth-place finish...

The 16 players with the best non-penalty goals-per-game ratio

Luis Suarez sits ahead of Ronaldo in third, with Tottenham star Harry Kane making up the rest of the top five.

Former Manchester City striker Edin Dzeko takes 10th spot in the list, the Bosnian's brilliant record from open play (199 goals in 423 games) proving that he's one of the greatest strikers of the modern era - and probably of all time.

Mohamed Salah and Neymar's places in the top 16 are made all the more impressive by virtue of the fact that neither player has operated as an out-and-out striker for the majority of their careers.

Both are currently scoring a non-penalty league goal at a rate better than one every two games, which is simply phenomenal.

However, the free-scoring superstars are nowhere near Messi's superhuman record, although that's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of!