Luis Suarez needs to play again for Uruguay just so he can reach 30 goals.
If you are wondering how Guatemala is there but not other good countries form their region like 🇺🇸🇲🇽🇨🇦🇵🇦 it’s because the top 4 teams usually skip the qualifying rounds, which gives them less games to score in
Karim Bagheri being the 7th highest scorer while playing Defensive Midfield is pretty damn impressive
Surprised it’s not an Australian player from the era when they were pumping 10 past Oceania micronations regularly.
Never forget Archie Thompson scoring 13 and then getting dropped for the next match
I think it’s because we only ever played a handful of games and we didn’t have a huge goal scoring machine so most of the time the we’d have things like 6 goals and 5 scorers.
Ronaldo and Messi have nothing over El Pescadito
We all know that CR means Carlos Ruiz, thats why Cristiano had to put the his number (CR7) there to not get confused with the real GOAT
I found his stats to be very interesting, since Guatemala plays in the Concacaf qualifiers he often had the chance to play against very weak teams, and in particular of those 39 goals 5 were for example against Antigua and Barbuda, 5 vs Saint Vincent and Grenadines and 4 against Trinidad and Tobago
And in particular he played against Saint Vincent only once, where he scored 5 goals in what was also his farewell match before retiring at 37 years
Lewa’s 30 goals in 37 games is impressive given how unimpressive Poland is.
Yeah but if you look closer Poland is ranked 30 in the FIFA Rankings (I know, but as an approximation it works) and these are the goals and the current ranking of the other teams (I know, they weren’t the same before, but just as a guide):
6 vs San Marino (207)
5 vs Romania (47)
4 vs Armenia (91)
4 vs Andorra (153)
3 vs Montenegro (68)
3 vs Denmark (18)
2 vs Kazakhstan (100)
1 vs Albania (62)
1 vs Sweden (23)
1 vs Hungary (32)
He scored 18 against teams significantly worse than Poland (San Marino, Armenia, Andorra, Kazakhstan) and then other 9 vs teams that are worse even if it’s closer (Romania, Montenegro, Albania).
You play whoever you get to play. Not shitting on him. But Poland being unimpressive is on the context of the Top UEFA teams, but the most goals came vs teams that are much weaker.
And again, not shitting on Lewa, all top players score more on worse teams, so did Cristiano, Leo, Suarez, etc.
Yeah but Poland being ranked 30th is because of Lewa though. Without him they’d be nowhere near that.
They still wouldn’t be as bad as the first group. In fact, before he started playing for the NT, Poland was 22nd in 2007, 24th in 2006, 22nd in 2005, and so on… The hovered around 20-30 the decade before him. Their average ranking since 1992 is 35.
So not really. They would be a bit worse on average, and likely wouldn’t have reached their best rankings which were with him. But their “typical team” historically has been significantly better than the most of the teams I mentioned above.
MLS legend Carlos Ruiz ❤️ he was a baller during my early childhood
I am surprised Lukaku is not up there. He always seem to score a bunch against minnows every qualifiers for tournaments.
Good to see Dzeko up there. It’s a shame our team is shit now
To be honest we have good young players coming in. The FA are so rotten that the team don’t even wanna play anymore and ofc the new manager isn’t ideal at all.
miura 💀
Shevchenko absolute monster
Exactly, impressive score not only because he was playing for Ukraine but also because apart from 2 goals against Andorra he never played against the various San Marino, Liechtenstein and obviusly also Gibraltar since they started participating in the qualifiers in 2016
Thank you
Happy to have met El Pescadito a couple of times. Absolute class and a gem of a person.
What does participations mean? Not number of WCQ tournaments in any case
I think that the number might count playoff games (between countries of the same or different continents) as a separate thing, otherwise some figures shouldn’t be that high
Fun fact about Karim Bagheri: a quarter of his 28 goals came in one match, when he scored 7 against Maldives in Iran’s qualifying match for the 1998 world cup.