Barcelona celebrates Lionel Messi's 500th club goal with a great video of his first

Lionel Messi did several big things on Sunday.

He equalized for Barcelona against eternal rivals Real Madrid in a Clasico that wasn’t so much played as shot skyward in fireworks. Then he scored the 92nd-minute winner, shivving Real’s pride and reopening the title race in earnest. And, finally, he held his jersey aloft to the hostile crowd in a rare act of bravado by a usually impossibly humble man.

In the process, he did another thing: he became the first player to score 500 official goals in Barca’s history.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. Consider that even a storied club like Barca had never before produced a player to score more than 232 competitive goals. That was Cesar, who did it from 1942 through 1955.

No other man has more than 200. And the only modern-day players to come close are Samuel Eto’o (2004-2009) and Rivaldo (1997-2002), with 130 apiece. You might argue that few players have had the benefit of being a starter up front at Barca for 11 seasons, but then that, too, is an accomplishment he’s earned through his transcendence.

So the club marked the occasion by making a short, narrated clip of Messi’s first ever goal for the club back on May 1, 2005 against Albacete in La Liga, almost two months before his 18th birthday.

Frank Rijkaard sent the shaggy-haired minor on and soon enough, a Ronaldinho chip sent him through, before the Argentine — just four years on from leaving his country — scored with a delicate lob.

But he was offsides and the referee disallowed the goal.

So he just did it again. He ran at a defender, laid off for Ronaldinho, who again freed him up with a chip. And then Messi boldly pulled the same move, lobbing the ball over the goalkeeper a second time.

That was, almost unimaginably, 499 goals ago.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.