For Cristiano Ronaldo, football has become all about records. He will not win the Champions League this season, and even the Serie A title is looking like a stretch, but at least he’ll have various all-time goals records. This month, Ronaldo surpassed Pelé’s mark for most goals in official games, and he is within seven of Iran striker Ali Daei’s men's international scoring record of 109 goals.
Goal-scoring records are always slightly spurious. Pelé, at least, seems to have accepted that Ronaldo has now surpassed him in official games, but such things are always at least to an extent arbitrary. Across eras, across countries, what should count is never entirely clear. A lot of Pelé’s greatest performances came on extremely testing tours of Europe with Santos, but those games are classified as friendlies and so don’t register. But then which friendlies do you begin to consider? The case of Josef Bican, who has scored more goals than Ronaldo, although not necessarily in official games, is even more complex.
International goals are a little easier to assess, given everybody seems to accept that goals scored in tournaments, in qualifiers and in friendlies should all be tallied. But, of course, some players play a lot more than others, partly because some countries play more games than others, and partly because a good player in a weaker footballing country would tend to have a longer career than a player of similar ability playing for a nation that produces large numbers of elite players.
Nobody doubts that Pelé and Bican were greats of the game, but with international goals the picture is much less clear-cut. The list of those who have scored more than 50 international goals is eclectic. It comprises only 61 names—the great Diego Maradona is not among them—and of those, only three have scored at a clip of more than a goal a game, led by Poul Nielsen, who scored 52 goals in 38 matches (1.37 goals per game) for Denmark between 1910 and 1925.
Admittedly he is only tied for 51st on the list, level with Jon Dahl Tomasson (Denmark), Javier Hernández (Mexico), Phil Younghusband (Philippines) and Adnan Al Talyani (United Arab Emirates). But the odd mix of players carries on to the top of the chart. Although Pelé is seventh, Ferenc Puskás fourth and Ronaldo second, sixth is Hussain Saeed (Iraq), fifth is Godfrey Chitalu (Zambia) and third is Mokhtar Dahari (Malaysia).
Chitalu, at least, is recognized in Africa as an all-time great. He was part of the Zambia side that finished second in African qualifying for the 1974 World Cup (when only one team, Zaire, made it to West Germany) and scored a record 116 goals for Kabwe Warriors and his country in 1972. He had just taken over as coach of Zambia when he and the majority of the squad were killed in a plane crash near Libreville, Gabon, in 1993.
