On Wednesday night, Portuguese international, Cristiano Ronaldo scored his 760th goal for club and country, in Juventus’ two goals to nothing win over Napoli to become the highest goalscorer of all time in football history. The win came in an Italian Super Cup win over the Naples side. But the big question is, is it true Ronaldo is the highest goalscorer in the world?
The Portuguese have netted five times for boyhood club Sporting Lisbon, 118 goals while at Manchester United, 450 goals for La Liga giants Real Madrid, 85 goals for his current club Juventus and 102 for National team Portugal – so the figures are real.
But the biggest confusion appears to come from his rivals of the olden days, as long-time record holder Josef Bican’s country, the Czech football federation claims Josef Bican netted 821 official goals and not the recorded 760 goals.
On Thursday, the Czech football federation claimed Cristiano Ronaldo has not broken Bican’s all-time goalscoring record and will need to score 62 more goals to break the record.
In a statement published by Czech football’s governing body, it claimed Bican’s goal tally stands at 821 goals, meaning the former Real Madrid star would need 62 more goals to break the record.
Czech football’s governing body says Bican is football’s all-time top goalscorer (excluding those who didn’t play at the top level) with 805 goals from just 530 matches, with Brazilian legend Romario on 772 goals and Brazil great Pele on 767 goals.
Bican played for five football clubs including Rapid Vienna, Slavia Prague, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in a football career that spanned from 1931 to 1955. The prolific striker died in 2001.
But among Bican’s 805 goals were 27 he scores for the amateur and reserve teams of Rapid Vienna, including goals scored in unofficial matches. Remove those goals and the striker finished his football career with 759 goals in 495 matches, while playing the Free Sky Lottery game could help the fans just as the Portuguese continue to find the back of the net in his matches to come.
RSSSF also noted that some data is partly missing on the second division of the Czech league as far back as 1952.
The Czech football team’s Twitter account read: “The history and statistics committee of the Czech FA counted all the goals scored by the legendary Josef Bican and we can declare he scored 821 goals in official matches.”
This is not the only confusion, Pele and Romario are both in the picture. There is some dispute over their tallies – with both forwards claiming to have scored in excess of 1,000 goals. Guess another record is partly missing in Brazil.
Barcelona superstar forward Lionel Messi recently broke Pele’s goal scoring record of 643 goals for a single club … but Pele’s club, Santos, then claimed the legendary Brazilian actually scored 1,091 goals for the club including friendlies.
In fact, Pele’s official Instagram bio reads he is the leading goalscorer of all time at 1,283 goals. But taking away friendly and unofficial goals (including one scored for a military side back in 1959) and Legend’s 757 strikes for his club Santos, National team Brazil and New York Cosmos FC seems to be the stat doing the rounds.
In 2007, Romario celebrated his 1,000th strike – but that included friendly youth and testimonial matches. He is credited with 745 strikes although that goal tally appears to change from one report to another report.
Maybe he is the highest goal scorer or not, the most important this is that the Juventus forward is a prolific goal scorer.