Yamal Equals a Messi Record as Barça Go Five From Five

Six goals in five matchdays and three straight braces: Lamine Yamal has matched a fourteen-year-old Messi record while Barcelona take a perfect fifteen points. Here is the LaLiga 2026-27 table — and what it means for your coupon.

Some starts to a season are forgotten by November. Others end up framing the whole campaign. Lamine Yamal's opening to LaLiga 2026-27 belongs firmly in the second category: six goals in five matchdays, three consecutive braces, and a record no Barcelona player had touched since Lionel Messi in 2012. Sunday's 4-2 win away at Levante kept the Catalans on a perfect five from five and pushed them clear at the top of the LaLiga 2026-27 table, three points ahead of a Real Madrid side that has barely slipped either. If you fill in a Spanish quiniela coupon each week, those numbers are worth a second look: a team that wins every week is simultaneously the easiest box on the slip and the most dangerous.

Three braces in five games: the Messi record Yamal just matched

What has travelled around Europe is not simply the goal tally but the shape of it. Yamal has scored twice in three of Barcelona's first five league fixtures — something no Barcelona player had managed since Messi did it at the start of the 2012-13 season. That is a fourteen-year gap. There is even a wrinkle that flatters the teenager: Yamal's three braces came back to back, whereas Messi's were spread out with a blank afternoon in between.

The 19-year-old also wears the number 10 shirt Messi made his own for a decade, a piece of symbolism the international press has not been shy about. At Levante he opened the scoring on 19 minutes and finished the job from the penalty spot on 48, with Xavi Espart and Karim Adeyemi rounding off the 4-2.

• A brace against Rayo Vallecano
• A brace against Valencia at Mestalla, in a game overshadowed by fan protests
• A brace against Levante (19' and 48', the second from the spot)

Perfect 15 points: how the LaLiga 2026-27 table looks now

After five rounds Barcelona are the only side with a 100% record. Fifteen points from fifteen, and a three-point cushion over Real Madrid and Real Betis, the latter having gatecrashed the top three with a Monday night win at Villarreal. Behind them sit three clubs level on ten points, among them a Deportivo Alavés team that keeps refusing to behave like a promotion-threatened outsider, while newly promoted Deportivo de La Coruña have nine, largely thanks to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

The bottom of the table tells its own story. Elche and Valencia have started nowhere near where their squads suggested they should, and Villarreal — European campaigners last season — still cannot buy a run of form. It is exactly that gap between what we expected in August and what the table says in September that decides who wins the office prediction league.

The Pichichi race: four players tied on six

You rarely see a logjam this early at the top of the scoring charts. Four players go into matchday six on six goals apiece, with a chasing pack of five just behind. Aubameyang keeps scoring for a promoted Dépor side, Yassir Zabiri has become Racing Santander's main threat, and Roberto Fernández's double in Pamplona lifted Espanyol into mid-table comfort.

Every matchday 5 result

Round five produced three draws, a heavyweight away win in San Sebastián, and confirmation that Real Madrid intend to fight for everything after brushing Rayo aside with a Mbappé double.

What all this means for your coupon

A team on a perfect run is the oldest trap on the slip. Backing a Barcelona home win feels free, but the real cost is not accuracy — it is that everybody else gets it right too. If 90% of your league ticks the same box, that pick separates you from nobody. The value sits in the fixtures where the person next to you hesitates.

1. Watch who plays midweek. Barcelona and Madrid are alternating Champions League and league fixtures, and that is where rotation and dropped points appear.
2. Be sceptical about big clubs in trouble. Valencia, Elche and Villarreal are producing results their squads do not justify, and that makes the draw a genuinely profitable call.
3. Ride the promoted sides with momentum. Dépor and Racing are outperforming their budgets and are still under-respected in other people's predictions.
4. Save your hedges for the genuinely tight games, and check the likely line-ups before you lock in matchday 8.

We covered the Mestalla brace at the time in our Valencia - Barcelona report, and with hindsight it was not a one-off but the second chapter of a historic run.

A season this promising is more fun when you argue about it with someone. On quiniPrats you can set up a private prediction league with friends, family or colleagues, call each round as it comes and find out who still has the stomach for it by November. You do not need to be an expert — you just need the nerve to write your score down before the ball rolls.