The 4 players with a better European Cup goalscoring ratio than Messi & Ronaldo | OneFootball

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are by some distance the top two goalscorers in the storied history of the European Cup (including the modern Champions League era), and it’s difficult to envisage them being dethroned any time soon.

But the two era-defining icons don’t have the best goals-per-game ratio. Messi has a record of 129 goals in 163 appearances, averaging 0.79 per game, which is marginally better than Ronaldo’s average of 0.77 from 140 goals in 183 appearances – which is the exact same ratio as Ruud van Nistelrooy and, at the time of writing, Robert Lewandowski.

Here are the only four players (from those with 25+ goals only) who can boast a better European Cup goals-per-game ratio than both Messi and Ronaldo.

Erling Haaland

57 goals in 58 appearances – 0.98 goals per game

The only active (or even alive) player who can claim a better Champions League goals-per-game record than Messi and Ronaldo.

Haaland announced himself on the European stage as a 19-year-old for Red Bull Salzburg. He scored a first-half hat-trick on his European debut against Genk and hasn’t looked back since.

The striker scored eight goals in six appearances for Salzburg in the group stage that season before moving to Borussia Dortmund, where he also bettered a goal-a-game average with 15 in 13.

Surprisingly enough, his goalscoring returns have actually dipped slightly since moving to Manchester City, but 34 goals in 39 Champions League is still an exceptional strikerate. It includes firing City to the trophy (and the treble) in his debut season, with 12 goals in 11 games and 52 in all competitions.

At the age of 25, Haaland stands seventh in the all-time goalscorer charts. Keep this up and he might one day surpass Messi and Ronaldo.

Gerd Muller

35 goals in 34 appearances – 0.97 goals per game

There’s arguably never been a more devastatingly effective centre-forward than Die Bomber, who almost averaged a goal per game between 1969 and 1977 at Bayern Munich.

Nobody, not even Ronaldo, can match Muller’s peak years. Between 1972 and 1975, he won both the World Cup and European Championships with West Germany and three successive European Cups with Bayern.

All of that was after his one and only Ballon d’Or in 1970, while his goalscoring numbers throughout the 70s were invariably out of this world.

Ferenc Puskas

36 goals in 41 appearances – 0.88 goals per game

Alfredo Di Stefano scored a hat-trick in Real Madrid’s 1970 European Cup final victory over Eintracht Frankfurt.

Unbelievably, the Argentinian was outdone that night by Puskas – who scored four. Los Blancos won 7-3.

The forward scored well over 400 goals for his hometown club Budapest Honved, including one in the European Cup, before seeing out his twilight playing years in style in the Spanish capital, lifting the trophy three times.

Alfredo Di Stefano

49 goals in 58 appearances – 0.88 goals per game

Sir Alex Ferguson was a schoolboy apprentice with Queen’s Park when he watched Di Stefano’s Real Madrid put Eintracht Frankfurt to the sword in the 1960 European Cup final. He was one of 127,000 in attendance that famous night.

“He had fantastic balance and poise – if you look at one of the goals he scored against Eintracht Frankfurt it was completely what we were talking about – the balance he had. Unbelievable, he was,” he added.

“The amazing thing about that was that Eintracht Frankfurt beat Rangers in the semi-finals, 6-3 and 6-1. They came to Hampden Park as gods. They were then annihilated by Real Madrid in the final 7-3.”

Di Stefano scored a hat-trick that night – the fifth successive final victory he scored in for Los Blancos.