5 amazing Guinness World Records held by footballers
Football is not just an effort to put a ball into a net. It has, at its pinnacles, an aesthetic dimension – it is not just a game, but an art. However, football is an art which can be, more or less, confined within a set of numbers.
People may argue about putting the game of football under statistical purview or debate whether a certain individual or team is better and what not. Even so, certain players put up such numbers, or say, create or break a world record that even the football purists consider untouchable.
Guinness World Records is the primary international authority on cataloging and verification of a huge number of world records. Here, today, we take a look at 5 such Guinness world records held by footballers.
#1 Just Fontaine
What: Most goals scored in a single World cup.
When: 1958
Where: Sweden
A lot can change over the course of 58 years. But some records – stand the test of time to the point of appearing unbreakable. One such record appears to be held by Frenchman Just Fontaine.
Fontaine scored 13 goals in Sweden that summer, across the six matches that France played. It remains the record for the most goals scored in a single World Cup tournament.
Fontaine netted a hat trick in France’s opening match that summer, then proceeded to score in every game for Les Blues thereafter. And he didn’t simply load up in one or two matches. He scored multiple times in four of the six contests, including a four-goal virtuosity against defending champs West Germany in the third-place game.
To put it in perspective, Miroslav Klose played 24 matches across four World Cups to earn his 16. Ronaldo(15 goals) and Gerd Mueller(14 goals) – required 19 and 13 matches, respectively, to hit their marks. Again, Fontaine needed only six.
That’s a remarkable 2.17 goals per game average, the second-highest of any player to have ever scored 10 or more goals in a World Cup career (Hungary’s Sandor Kocsis hit 2.2/game with 11 goals in five matches in 1954).
Fontaine’s record seems to have stood the test of time and 58 years on, it appears nobody may challenge one of the sport’s most long-standing achievements.