227: Tavares Passes Boutaleb As Nantes's Most Prolific Scorer

The number is 227. Abdelmajid Boutaleb's mark of 221 stood for years as the tallest thing a Nantes forward could climb; Eurico Tavares has now gone six past it, and the club's scoring chart has a new name at the top.

Tavares did not arrive at this in a single summer. The Portuguese forward's Nantes years have been a slow accumulation, the kind of ledger that looks modest season by season and startling when it is added up. Twenty-eight of the 227 came in the 2062/63 campaign alone, a season in which Nantes were busy on two fronts and their centre-forward was rarely the man rested.

He has since moved on, and that is the twist in the arithmetic. The record sits with a player no longer on the payroll, a name in the history books rather than the team sheet. Nantes, twice Champions League runners-up and holders of fifteen Ligue 1 titles, have had plenty of forwards pass through; few have left a column this long behind them.

'To see my name above his is strange and wonderful,' Tavares said of following Boutaleb. 'Nantes gave me the years. I gave them the goals. That feels like a fair trade.'

The wider tally reads 266 in 463 club games across four clubs — a striker who has done this wherever he has been, and whose next chapter is already under way elsewhere.

The 2062/63 season had already carried Nantes deep into Europe and kept them pressing Lyon at home, as this column noted in January. The man who scored through that run has now given the club the one line in its record books that never ages.