WORLD CUP 2026 REVIEW – PART 12

Haaland, new World Cup’s top one-edition scorer (qualification + finals)

This year, Erling Haaland became the first player in history to score 20+ goals in a single World Cup campaign, combining the qualifying and final stages.
Eusébio was in 1966 the first to reach the 15-goal milestone (7 in qualifying, 9 in the final stage, for a total of 16).
His record was broken in the following tournament by Gerd Müller (19 goals: 9 plus 10). Müller’s feat was subsequently matched twice—by Karim Bagheri in 1998 and Cristiano Ronaldo in 2018—but both had a lower proportion of goals in the final stage (in fact, all 19 of Bagheri’s goals came in qualifying), making Müller’s achievement more significant.
It was not until the 2026 edition that a player finally emerged who not only surpassed Müller’s record but shattered it. Haaland netted 16 times in the qualifying stage and 7 times in the finals, raising the record to a remarkable 23 goals in just 13 matches (8 plus 5).
In this ranking, goalscorers with the same total number of goals are ordered according to their tally in the final tournament.
Besides Haaland, two other 2026 World Cup stars reached the 15-goal mark: Lionel Messi (16) and Kylian Mbappé (15).
Mbappé is the third player on this list—following Eusébio and Müller—to score more goals in the final tournament than in the qualifiers.