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 Argentina'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.
- ^ "Second-half surge sees Tunisia bow out in style". FIFA. Archived from the original on 2018-06-28. Retrieved 2018-07-09.
- ^ FIFA World Cup — Milestone Goals (PDF) (Report). FIFA. October 2007. p. 1. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 3, 2008. Retrieved 2014-09-05.
- ^ a b "World Cup — All-time Topscorers". WorldFootball.net. HEIM:SPIEL Medien GmbH & Co. KG. Archived from the original on 2022-12-19. Retrieved 2015-09-25.
- ^ "FIFA World Cup Players Statistics — Players with the Most Goals Scored". FIFA. Archived from the original on August 28, 2015. Retrieved 2018-05-15.
- ^ "FIFA World Cup Players Statistics". FIFA. 2014-07-25. Archived from the original on August 28, 2015. Retrieved 2014-07-30.
- ^ "Which player has scored the most goals in World Cup knockout games? | The Knowledge". the Guardian. 2022-12-07. Archived from the original on 2023-01-14. Retrieved 2022-12-13.