Champions League All-Time Top Scorers

Ronaldo, Messi and the greatest European goalscorers

No competition in club football carries the prestige of the European Cup and its modern successor, the UEFA Champions League, and its all-time scoring charts read like a history of the game's finest forwards. Two names tower above the rest: Cristiano Ronaldo, with a record 140 goals, and Lionel Messi, on 129, the only two players ever to pass 120.

Ronaldo scored his 140 across Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus, with the bulk arriving during a remarkable spell at Real Madrid that included the single-season record of 17 goals in 2013–14. Messi built almost all of his 129 at Barcelona before adding a few more at Paris Saint-Germain. Their decade-long duel redefined what a Champions League goal tally could look like.

Behind them, Robert Lewandowski (109) is the top active scorer, having piled up goals at Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich and Barcelona, while Karim Benzema (90) and Real Madrid's totem of the 2000s, Raúl (71), lead the rest. What stands out lower down is the new generation: Kylian Mbappé (70) and Erling Haaland (57) have already climbed into the all-time top ten while still in their twenties, on course to threaten the records above them.

The rest of the top twenty mixes eras and styles, Thomas Müller and Ruud van Nistelrooy from the 2000s and 2010s, England captain Harry Kane, and Mohamed Salah, alongside European Cup-era greats such as Alfredo Di Stéfano and Eusébio. Whether from the black-and-white years or the modern game, scoring in Europe has always separated the great from the merely very good.