A total of over 2,700 goals have been scored in games at the Men's 22 final tournaments of the FIFA World Cup, not counting penalties scored during shoot-outs. [1] Since the first goal scored by French player Lucien Laurent at the 1930 FIFA World Cup, [2] almost 1,300 footballers have scored goals at the World Cup tournaments, [3] of whom 101 have scored five or more.
Goals | ≥11 | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nos. of players | 9 | 6 | 10 | 9 | 7 | 25 | 35 | >50 | >90 | >200 | >750 | >1,250 |
The top goalscorer of the inaugural competition was Argentina's Guillermo Stábile with eight goals. Since then, only 25 players have scored more at all the games played at the World Cup than Stábile did throughout the 1930 tournament. The first was Hungary's Sándor Kocsis with eleven in 1954. At the next tournament, France's Just Fontaine improved on this record with 13 goals in only six games. Gerd Müller scored 10 for West Germany in 1970 and broke the overall record when he scored his 14th goal in a tournament match at a World Cup during West Germany's win in the 1974 final. His record stood for more than three decades until Ronaldo's 15 goals between 1998 and 2006 for Brazil. Germany's Miroslav Klose went on to score a record 16 goals across four consecutive tournaments between 2002 and 2014.
Of all the players who have played in the World Cup tournaments, only six have achieved an average of two goals or more per game played: Kocsis, Fontaine, Stábile, Russia's Oleg Salenko, Switzerland's Josef Hügi, and Poland's Ernst Wilimowski — the last of these scored four in his single World Cup game in 1938. [5] The top 101 goalscorers have represented 30 nations, with 14 players scoring for Brazil, and another 14 for Germany or West Germany. In total, 67 footballers came from UEFA (Europe), 30 from CONMEBOL (South America), and only four from elsewhere: Cameroon, Ghana, Australia, and the United States.
Fontaine holds the record for the most goals scored in a single tournament, with 13 goals in 1958. The players that came closest were Kocsis in 1954, Müller in 1970 and Portugal's Eusébio in 1966, with 11, 10 and 9, respectively. The lowest scoring top scorer was in 1962, when six players tied at only four goals each. Across the 22 tournaments of the World Cup, 31 footballers have been credited with the most tournament goals, and no one has achieved this feat twice. Ten of them scored at least seven goals in a tournament, while Brazil's Jairzinho and Argentine's Lionel Messi were the only footballers to score at least seven goals without being the top goalscorer of the tournament in 1970 and 2022, respectively. These 31 top goalscorers played for 20 nations, the most (five) for Brazil. Another five came from other South American countries, with the remaining 21 coming from Europe.
In 2006, Ronaldo was the first to score 8 goals in knockout matches (excluding 3rd place playoff) at the World Cup in his 3 tournaments for Brazil, tied in 2022 by Kylian Mbappé. [6] Mbappé became the first player to score 4 goals in World Cup finals with his hat-trick in 2022.
♦ | Denotes national top scorers (or joint top scorers) at the World Cup |
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# | Denotes players still active at international level |
[ ] | Denotes tournaments where the player was part of the squad, but did not play in a match |
( ) | Denotes tournaments where the player played in a match, but did not score a goal |
† | Denotes tournaments where the player's team won the World Cup |
Key | |
---|---|
Goal set a new record | |
Goal equalled the existing record |
Cristiano Ronaldo is the only player to have scored in five different World Cups. Four players, Uwe Seeler, Pelé, Miroslav Klose and Lionel Messi, have scored in four tournaments each, while another 35 have scored in three each.
In the table below players are listed in order of achieving their tallies.
Rank | Player | Team | Tournaments with goals | Goals scored | Matches played | Goals per match | Tournaments with goals |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Cristiano Ronaldo | Portugal | 5 | 8 | 22 | 0.36 | 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022 |
2 | Uwe Seeler | West Germany | 4 | 9 | 21 | 0.43 | 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970 |
Pelé | Brazil | 12 | 14 | 0.86 | 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970 | ||
Miroslav Klose | Germany | 16 | 24 | 0.67 | 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Lionel Messi | Argentina | 13 | 26 | 0.50 | 2006, 2014, 2018, 2022 | ||
6 | Grzegorz Lato | Poland | 3 | 10 | 20 | 0.50 | 1974, 1978, 1982 |
Joe Jordan | Scotland | 4 | 7 | 0.57 | 1974, 1978, 1982 | ||
Andrzej Szarmach | Poland | 7 | 13 | 0.54 | 1974, 1978, 1982 | ||
Dominique Rocheteau | France | 4 | 10 | 0.40 | 1978, 1982, 1986 | ||
Michel Platini | France | 5 | 14 | 0.36 | 1978, 1982, 1986 | ||
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge | West Germany | 9 | 19 | 0.47 | 1978, 1982, 1986 | ||
Diego Maradona | Argentina | 8 | 21 | 0.38 | 1982, 1986, 1994 | ||
Rudi Völler | West Germany Germany | 8 | 15 | 0.53 | 1986, 1990, 1994 | ||
Lothar Matthäus | West Germany Germany | 6 | 25 | 0.24 | 1986, 1990, 1994 | ||
Roberto Baggio | Italy | 9 | 16 | 0.56 | 1990, 1994, 1998 | ||
Jürgen Klinsmann | West Germany Germany | 11 | 17 | 0.65 | 1990, 1994, 1998 | ||
Gabriel Batistuta | Argentina | 10 | 12 | 0.83 | 1994, 1998, 2002 | ||
Fernando Hierro | Spain | 5 | 12 | 0.42 | 1994, 1998, 2002 | ||
Sami Al-Jaber | Saudi Arabia | 3 | 9 | 0.33 | 1994, 1998, 2006 | ||
Raúl | Spain | 5 | 11 | 0.45 | 1998, 2002, 2006 | ||
Henrik Larsson | Sweden | 5 | 13 | 0.38 | 1994, 2002, 2006 | ||
Ronaldo | Brazil | 15 | 19 | 0.79 | 1998, 2002, 2006 | ||
David Beckham | England | 3 | 13 | 0.23 | 1998, 2002, 2006 | ||
Park Ji-sung | South Korea | 3 | 14 | 0.21 | 2002, 2006, 2010 | ||
Cuauhtémoc Blanco | Mexico | 3 | 11 | 0.27 | 1998, 2002, 2010 | ||
Robin van Persie | Netherlands | 6 | 17 | 0.35 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Arjen Robben | Netherlands | 6 | 15 | 0.40 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Tim Cahill | Australia | 5 | 9 | 0.56 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Clint Dempsey | United States | 4 | 10 | 0.40 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Asamoah Gyan | Ghana | 6 | 11 | 0.55 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
David Villa | Spain | 9 | 12 | 0.75 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Rafael Márquez | Mexico | 3 | 19 | 0.16 | 2006, 2010, 2014 | ||
Luis Suárez | Uruguay | 7 | 16 | 0.44 | 2010, 2014, 2018 | ||
Javier Hernández | Mexico | 4 | 12 | 0.33 | 2010, 2014, 2018 | ||
Keisuke Honda | Japan | 4 | 10 | 0.40 | 2010, 2014, 2018 | ||
Edinson Cavani | Uruguay | 5 | 17 | 0.29 | 2010, 2014, 2018 | ||
Xherdan Shaqiri | Switzerland | 5 | 12 | 0.42 | 2014, 2018, 2022 | ||
Ivan Perišić | Croatia | 6 | 17 | 0.35 | 2014, 2018, 2022 | ||
Neymar | Brazil | 8 | 13 | 0.62 | 2014, 2018, 2022 | ||
Ángel Di María | Argentina | 3 | 18 | 0.17 | 2014, 2018, 2022 | ||
Player | Team | Goals scored | Finals played | Final(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Kylian Mbappé | France | 4 | 2 | 2018, 2022 |
Geoff Hurst | England | 3 | 1 | 1966 |
Vavá | Brazil | 2 | 1958, 1962 | |
Pelé | Brazil | 2 | 1958, 1970 | |
Zinedine Zidane | France | 2 | 1998, 2006 | |
Gino Colaussi | Italy | 2 | 1 | 1938 |
Silvio Piola | Italy | 1 | 1938 | |
Helmut Rahn | West Germany | 1 | 1954 | |
Mario Kempes | Argentina | 1 | 1978 | |
Paul Breitner | West Germany | 2 | 1974, 1982 | |
Ronaldo | Brazil | 2 | (1998), 2002 | |
Lionel Messi | Argentina | 2 | (2014), 2022 | |
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