Who Is All-Time Champions League Top Scorer?

Who is currently in the lead for the record for most goals scored in Europe’s top club competition? We’ve looked at the best performers.

Some of the greatest goal scorers in history have competed in the Champions League. It is the premier club competition in Europe and possibly the entire world, and it has hosted a large number of football legends.

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Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, strikers like Raul and Andriy Shevchenko reigned, but Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have elevated the art of scoring to a completely new level.

THEEAGLE takes a look at the all-time top scorers in the competition’s history, dating back to the inaugural European Cup in 1955.

All-Time Champions League Top Scorer

Cristiano Ronaldo has scored the most goals in Champions League history, as seen in the table below (including the European Cup). His bitter adversary Lionel Messi is right behind him.

Fourth-place finisher Karim Benzema is followed by Raul, who rounds out the top five. Ruud van Nistelrooy, Thomas Muller, and Thierry Henry are among the top of the rest of the field.

List of Champions League/European Cup all-time top 20 goalscorers

*Correct as of games played on November 1st, 2022
**The list takes into consideration data from 1955-present
***Players in bold are still active

The majority of the players on the list of all-time goal scorers currently play or formerly played in the present Champions League era, which began in 1992 and introduced extra continental matches to the current schedule. Particularly, 17 of the 20 players on the aforementioned list played starting in the mid-1990s.

Yet, two players who competed before the Champions League (when the competition was known as the European Cup) still stand out, with former Real Madrid star Alfredo Di Stefano and legendary Benfica midfielder Eusebio appearing in and near the top 10.

Also among the top 20 is Ferenc Puskas, a star for Real Madrid in the 1950s and 1960s. Before Mohamed Salah beat him out for the top spot, former Bayern Munich attacker Gerd Muller was among the top 20. No player even comes close to Gerd Muller’s incredible goals-per-game ratio of 0.95, despite being nudged out.

Messi presently has a goal-to-game ratio of 0.8, which is unquestionably the greatest in the modern period, whereas Puskas’ was 0.85 and Di Stefano’s was 0.84.