Lionel Messi: How the worlds greatest compares on the global stage.

With Lionel Messi’s Argentina securing a place in the World Cup Final thanks to a dominant 3-0 win over Croatia. We look back at Messi’s goal scoring records on the global stage to see how it compares with the all time great goal scorers of the competition.

After scoring his 34th minute penalty against Croatia, Messi’s total for this competition reached 5 goals, putting him on level terms with his PSG teammate Kylian Mbappe who is eager to achieve back to back World Cup trophies with France. Both players on a level field in the race for the Golden Boot with both players heading to the final.

Messi’s Semi Final goal brought his tally of World Cup goals to 11 making him the all time top goal scorer for Argentina at the World Cup surpassing Gabriel Batistuta’s 10 goals.
Despite being the top scoring for his Nation at the World Cup other great goal scorers cast Messi into the shadows with some truly exceptional performances.

Germany’s Miroslav Klose was a very talented goal scorer in which he brought to his World Cup performances. Klose is the all time top scorer at the World Cup having scored 16 goals in 24 matches across 4 different world cups for Germany from 2002-2014. He averaged 0.67 goals per game in the World Cup and having broken the record for most goals at the tournament, he retired from International football after the 2014 World Cup having been content with the achievement of winning the competition.

Brazil’s Ronaldo Nazario is a close second in the all time World Cup Scoring Charts having been surpassed by Klose by 1 goal. Ronaldo’s 15 goals in 19 matches came across four World Cups too spanning from 1994-2006. Ronaldo only played 19 matches on the World stage due to his injury troubles during his playing career, drastically limiting his career. Had he not had such unfortunate injuries we could have seen a record set that no one could beat.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, West Germany’s Gerd Muller registered 14 goals in 13 matches giving us 1.08 goals per game. This feet is particularly impressive as Muller played in only two World Cups during his international career. 1970 and 1974. Muller held the record for Germany’s all time Goal scorer for almost 40 years before being surpassed by Klose in 2014, and he held the all time World Cup record until 2006 when Ronaldo surpassed him.

At the age of 34 this will be Messi’s final World Cup and a final chance for him to bring the trophy to Argentina. With this most likely being his last World Cup we see that despite being the greatest player of all time he isn’t the greatest World Cup scorer as shown above with the top three scorers dropping seriously impressive numbers on the Global stage.