The all-time top scorers in each of Europe’s big five leagues

Messi’s 474 in La Liga. Gerd Müller’s 365 in the Bundesliga. Silvio Piola’s 274 in Serie A. How the five league records compare, and who might break them.

Each of Europe’s big five leagues has an all-time scoring record. Some are held by modern players, some by players from the 1940s and 1950s. The five records vary a lot, partly because the leagues are different ages. Serie A and La Liga go back to 1929, while the Premier League in its current form only began in 1992.

La Liga: Messi, by a distance

Lionel Messi’s 474 La Liga goals for Barcelona are the highest total in any of the five leagues. Cristiano Ronaldo is second with 311, in only 292 games, and nobody else has reached 300. The rest of the top ten mixes modern players with greats from the 1950s.

Bundesliga: Müller’s record, and Lewandowski’s chase

Gerd Müller scored 365 Bundesliga goals for Bayern Munich between 1965 and 1979, in 427 games. Robert Lewandowski got closer than anyone, finishing on 312 when he left for Barcelona in 2022. He scored those goals in 384 games, a better rate than anyone except Müller himself.

Serie A: Piola, Totti and a long tail

Silvio Piola’s 274 goals have been the Serie A record since the 1950s. Francesco Totti came closest in modern times, with 250 goals in 618 games, all for Roma. Ciro Immobile, on 201, is the only player of the last decade in the top eight. Two Swedes, Gunnar Nordahl and Kurt Hamrin, appear in the top ten, a sign of how strong Swedish football was in the years after the Second World War.

Ligue 1: Onnis, and Mbappé’s near miss

Delio Onnis, an Argentine who played for Reims, Monaco, Tours and Toulon, scored 299 Ligue 1 goals between 1971 and 1986. The modern challenger was Kylian Mbappé, who reached 191 in 246 games before leaving Paris Saint-Germain for Real Madrid. Had he stayed, he would have been on course for the record within four or five seasons.

Premier League: Shearer’s record under threat

Alan Shearer’s 260 is the lowest of the five records, partly because the Premier League is the youngest of the five leagues. Harry Kane reached 213 before leaving Tottenham for Bayern Munich in 2023. Mohamed Salah, on 193 in our latest figures, is still adding to his total, and Erling Haaland is scoring faster than anyone in Premier League history. The full Premier League top ten:

Comparing across leagues

Goals per game is the fairest way to compare these records, and on that measure Ronaldo in Spain (311 in 292) is the only player in any of these top tens with more goals than games. Telmo Zarra (0.92 a game) and Messi (0.91) come next, then Gerd Müller (0.85). Shearer, at 0.59 a game, is lower, partly because his best years came in the 42-game seasons of the early 1990s and partly because of the injuries he had in the middle of his career.

Top-ten lists like these are what Football Tenable is built on: you try to name all ten before three wrong guesses end the round. In Football 501, any of these players can take a huge bite out of your score, as long as you pick the right league.

Who could break a record next?

Among players still active in each league when these figures were taken, none is close to any of the five records yet, but some are on the way.

Haaland is the only realistic threat. He needs another 141 Premier League goals to pass Shearer, and he has averaged more than 30 a season since arriving in England. Harry Kane is a long way from Gerd Müller’s 365 in Germany, but he is also scoring faster in the Bundesliga than anyone since Müller himself, with 102 goals in his first 100 Bundesliga games.

Iago Aspas is worth a mention too. He has spent nearly his whole La Liga career at Celta Vigo and is the leading active scorer in Spain with 171, which already makes him 18th on La Liga’s all-time list, but still a long way from Messi.

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Sources and method

Appearances and goals are league matches only, from Transfermarkt’s season-by-season player records, as used by the games on this site. Figures were checked on 2 November 2026 against data collected on 24 October 2026, early in the 2026/27 season, so totals for players still active will have moved on since.

Each league’s record counts goals scored in that league only. Ties in the top ten are listed in the order the data gives them.