Erling Haaland’s two goals against Porto on the opening matchday of the 2026/27 Champions League maintained the Manchester City striker’s incredible scoring rate in the competition.
Haaland has scored 59 goals from 59 games at the elite level of European club football, giving him the best goals-per-game ratio of any notable player in its history.
In fact, he is the only player to have scored a significant number of goals at a rate of at least one per game. It’s also the best scoring rate of the three active players among the Champions League's all-time top scorers: Haaland, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe.
The benchmark, however, is still some way off for all three. Cristiano Ronaldo is out in front with a staggering 140 goals from 183 appearances in the competition.
So, this raises the question: Can one of this generation’s elite goalscorers actually beat Ronaldo’s record?
Kane has an impressive haul of 54 goals in 70 games, but at 33, the England captain can almost certainly be ruled out of the race. Sadly for him, he stayed at Tottenham Hotspur for too long.
That leaves us with Haaland and Mbappe. Both are in action on Tuesday night, with Manchester City hosting PSG and Real Madrid visiting Roma.
Below is an appraisal of each man’s chances of going down as European club football’s greatest-ever goalscorer.
Erling Haaland
Haaland, 26, made his Champions League debut for RB Salzburg against Genk on September 17, 2019, and scored a hat-trick. Of course he did.
Since then, as stated above, he has scored at a rate of a goal per game in the competition. His best return came in 2022/23, when he scored 12 times in 11 games and ended up with a winner’s medal. He currently sits seventh on the all-time list.
This season will be his eighth in the Champions League. Among those, there is an outlier – 2021/22 – when he played just three games, scoring as many goals, as his then club, Borussia Dortmund, made an early exit.
Every other season, he has played at least eight games. If we remove that campaign and the current one, then he has a tally of 54 goals in 55 games across six seasons, at an average of nine goals per season.
By that calculation, he will need another 9.1 seasons (including the current one) to get the 82 goals he requires to break Ronaldo’s record – form, fitness and participation willing, of course.
That means Haaland needs to continue scoring at the same rate until the 2035/36 season. The Norwegian star, born in July 2000, will be 35 by then.
It’s a big ask to be so consistent for so long, but in this era of supreme athleticism, it’s far from inconceivable. There’s also the frightening prospect that he could still get better and increase his goal output.
Kylian Mbappe
Mbappe, 27, has 71 goals in 99 Champions League games following his strike in Real Madrid’s 2-1 victory over Inter Milan in their opening game of the 2026/27 competition. That took him to joint-fifth with Raul in the all-time list.
He made his UCL debut on September 27, 2016, with a 13-minute cameo off the bench in Monaco’s 1-1 draw with Bayer Leverkusen.
He is now into his 11th season of Champions League football. Mbappe has managed at least eight games in each of his first 10 seasons, making his average a pleasingly concise seven goals per season, with 70 goals across the 10 completed campaigns.
At that rate, he will need exactly 10 more to chalk up the 70 goals he requires to surpass Ronaldo. Mbappe will be 38 heading into the back end of the 2036/37 season.
It's clear he needs to speed up, and there's ample evidence to suggest that he has. His goals-per-game rate has spiked sharply since he moved to Real Madrid in 2024.
The France striker managed an incredible 15 goals in 11 games last term – his best return – while he has a total of 22 in 25 games in his two completed seasons at the club.
At an average of 11 per campaign, he would need another six-and-a-half seasons to potentially put him within striking distance of the record by the 2032/33 season, when he will be 34, turning 35 in December.
Verdict
The numbers suggest that both Haaland and Mbappe stand a reasonable chance of surpassing Ronaldo’s mark if they can stay fit and play in the majority of matches for their respective clubs.
Both will be helped by the extra games offered by the competition’s new format, with teams now guaranteed eight league phase games as opposed to the six group games Ronaldo used to get before the knockouts.
If anything, this exercise really underlines Ronaldo’s incredible longevity and potency in front of goal. Interestingly, he scored goal number 140 on his 183rd and final Champions League appearance in a 2-0 win for Manchester United over Villarreal on November 23, 2021. He was 36 years, nine months and 18 days old at the time.
Should Mbappe manage to stay at Madrid into the twilight of his career, then you would have to give him a shot, given the number of goals he has scored since his move to Los Blancos, and their consistency in reaching the latter stages of the competition year after year. Ronaldo was 33 when he left Madrid, while Mbappe's compatriot, Karim Benzema, stayed there until he was 35.
That said, averaging 11 per season to get there by the time he is 35 is a big ask, and he may need to keep playing into the second half of his 30s to eventually top the list.
Haaland, 19 months younger than Mbappe, will feel that 141 is an achievable target if he can regularly play 10 or more games per season in the competition.
As the younger man, and with the better goals-per-game ratio, you'd have to make the Manchester City striker a firm favourite. The X-factor is, of course, Mbappe's Real Madrid form. His 15 last season was the third most ever behind Ronaldo in 2015/16 (16) and 2013/14 (17).
Either way, it seems certain that both men will finish their careers considered among the finest goalscorers in modern football history. If either eventually stands alone as the best, remains to be seen.