Summary

A total of over 2,700 goals have been scored in matches across the 22 final tournaments of the men's FIFA World Cup, not counting penalties scored during shoot-outs. Since the first goal scored by French player Lucien Laurent in 1930, nearly 1,300 footballers have scored goals at the World Cup tournaments, of whom 101 have scored five or more.

The top goalscorer of the inaugural competition was Argentina's Guillermo Stábile, with eight goals. Since then, only 25 players have scored more World Cup goals in total than Stábile did during the 1930 tournament. The first to do so was Hungary's Sándor Kocsis, scoring eleven in 1954. At the following tournament, France's Just Fontaine improved on this record, recording thirteen goals in just six matches. Gerd Müller then scored ten goals for West Germany in 1970, before breaking the overall record when he scored his fourteenth World Cup goal during West Germany's win in the 1974 final. Müller's record stood for more than three decades, until Ronaldo recorded fifteen goals between 1998 and 2006 for Brazil. The record is currently held by Germany's Miroslav Klose, who went on to score a record sixteen goals across the four consecutive tournaments he played between 2002 and 2014.

Of all the players who have played at the World Cup, only six have achieved an average of two goals or more per match played: Kocsis, Fontaine, Stábile, Russia's Oleg Salenko, Switzerland's Josef Hügi, and Poland's Ernst Wilimowski — the latter of whom scored four in his only ever World Cup match, played in 1938. 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 and Ghana from CAF (Africa), Australia from AFC (Asia) (formerly from OFC of Oceania), and the United States from CONCACAF (North/Central America).

Fontaine's thirteen goals in 1958 remains the record for the most scored in a single World Cup tournament. The players that came closest to this tally were Kocsis in 1954 (eleven goals), Müller in 1970 (ten goals), and Portugal's Eusébio in 1966 (nine goals). The top scorers with the fewest goals were from the 1962 tournament, when six players finished joint-top with just four goals each. Across the 22 tournaments of the World Cup, 31 footballers have been credited as the tournament top scorer, and no one has achieved this feat twice. Ten of these players scored at least seven goals in a tournament, while Brazil's Jairzinho in 1970 and Argentina's Lionel Messi in 2022 were the only footballers to record at least seven goals but still not finish as the tournament's top scorer. These 31 top goalscorers played for 20 different nations, with the most (five) coming from Brazil. Another five came from other South American countries, with the remaining 21 coming from Europe.

In 2006, Ronaldo became the first player to score eight goals in knockout matches (excluding the third place play-off) at the World Cup, coming in his three tournaments for Brazil, a feat which would be equalled in 2022 by France's Kylian Mbappé. Mbappé himself became the first player to score four goals in World Cup final matches: he netted one in the 2018 final followed by a hat-trick in the 2022 final. England's Geoff Hurst is the only other player to record a hat-trick in a World Cup final, doing so in 1966.

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