Who is the ultimate big-game scorer in football history?

15:01, 28 Jan 2013
Miguel Delaney

How does Leo Messi compare with Diego Maradona? Is Cristiano Ronaldo's underestimated? Miguel Delaney crunches the numbers to investigate which star has been the most reliable in games of status

For all their dominance, Real Madrid were suffering an element of doubt. It was the middle of the second half in a very awkward European away game during their famous five-in-a-row but absolutely nothing was coming off.

So, increasingly, the ball found its way to Alfredo Di Stefano. It might have been unsaid but it was as if a number of players were looking for him to dig them out of a hole. As teammate Francisco Gento put it years later, the Argentine was “a born winner who made it almost impossible to lose”.

Of course, that ended up being the case. Another big game, another crucial Di Stefano goal, another rousing Real victory.

There was little doubt about it: he was the ultimate big-game player.

It’s interesting, though, how much doubt and discussion the very label causes for many modern players; how much they need to answer that truly determining question of whether they can apply their ability at the most exacting level. It isn't even so much an of ability, rather character, mentality and personality.

After Arsenal drew 2-2 with Chelsea in the winter of the 2004-05 season, Thierry Henry was clearly irritated.

It wasn’t, however, because his goals had failed to win the match or that Arsenal’s ‘invincible’ side now looked to have been overtaken by Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea. It was because, in the build-up, it had been suggested he had mental block when it came to such bouts.

“I guess this isn’t a big game, huh?” he asked the interviewer rather sniffily.

Of course, depending on how you look at it, the question remains open. Henry, for example, never scored in the semi-finals or final of a World Cup, European Championship or Champions League.

By contrast, these were the kind of games that Gerd Muller absolutely revelled in. In 13 such contests for club and country between 1970 and 1976, the arch-poacher scored 15 goals, with six of them genuinely decisive.

Absolutely no doubt about his big-game record. The wider issue with a lot of other players, however, is that ‘big games’ aren’t just dependent on stage or status. Context is also crucial.

For example, when Arsenal were on the ropes and drawing 2-2 at home to Liverpool having just gone out of the FA Cup and Champions League to the other two members of the English big four in the same week, invincibility wasn’t on their minds; implosion was.

Henry, however, refused to let that happen and scored the hat-trick that brought victory and, ultimately, the title as well as an unbeaten league season.

On a similar level, a notionally routine away trip to Siena takes on a completely different context if you need to win on the last day of the season.

As such, in order to attempt to investigate which modern and historical players truly rise to the occasion, we looked at their records in four main types of game:

• international tournament knock-out stages and group matches in which a result was essential
• semi-finals and finals in domestic cup competitions
• any match against those in the top three of their domestic division or historically-established rivals
• any league match where, due to a league, Champions League, relegation or simple record, a result was essential.

There are, however, a few caveats to the list:

• in order to establish a ‘baseline’, only players who had played in at least 30 of what we consider big games were included
• the lists could only go as far as statistics were available. For example, starting line-ups for older domestic games in Brazil proved difficult to acquire, meaning Jairzinho’s record could not be fully analysed

As goes without saying, this list only covers scoring records in big games and not general performance. For example, it does not legislate for the manner in which Roy Keane dominated Juventus in 1999, the way in which Diego Maradona cut open the West German defence with one pass to win it in the 1986 World Cup, or the fashion in which Johan Cruyff frequently opened up Inter at will in the 1973 European Cup final. As such, this list does not mean any of these players were ‘better’ big-game players - they just performed a much more quantifiable role.

In saying that, a few notes from the lists:

• from comparing historic players, it appears that anything above 0.2 decisive goals per big game (Raul, Francesco Totti, Zlatan Ibrahimovic) is a good record. Anything between 0.1 and 0.2 (Bobby Charlton, Steven Gerrard, Kenny Dalglish, Ruud Gullit) is very respectable
• the biggest discrepancy between decisive goals (0.16) and simple number of goals (0.62) surprisingly belongs to Ferenc Puskas . It seems that his finishes decorated big matches rather than decided them.
• the most efficient scorer is Zinedine Zidane.

The key list: most likely to decide a big game

* note: only game-changing goals were included; those which definitely decided the final result and distribution of points, eg, match-winner or final

The most likely to score in any given big game

Most goals per big game