The greatest strikers on the planet in my lifetime | OneFootball

Now that the 2023/24 Newcastle United Premier League campaign is complete, I have reverted back to some NUFC nostalgia over the last couple of days.

I’ve been concentrating on great Newcastle goals from the 1990s onwards.

This has prompted a couple of regulars in The Mag comments section (Daveed and Peter Stabler) to ask me if I would compile my own list of the best strikers in the world, in my lifetime.

I’m just going to concentrate on goalscoring prowess and some of the impact of each and every one of these players during their careers.

There is one player who is on my list of 10, primarily for the impact he made at Newcastle United.

Then two others for their goalscoring feats in the English First Division and Premier League.

This will be followed by the seven best foreign goal gluttons from my time being born in the 1960s to the present day.

Malcolm Macdonald was signed by Joe Harvey in 1971 for a club record fee of £185,000.

He arrived in a Rolls Royce and scored a hat-trick on his home debut against Bill Shankly’s formidable Liverpool.

The date was 21 August 1971 and is etched in my memory forever, as it was also the day my younger brother was born.

Supermac was powerful and lightning fast and in five years at Gallowgate had a phenomenal strike rate, scoring well over 100 goals, 95 of which came in the old First Division.

Malcolm Macdonald still holds the record for scoring the most goals for England in a single game, which he accomplished in 1975 when he bagged all five goals in a European Championship qualifier against Cyprus at Wembley.

Ian Rush and Alan Shearer are the two best goalscorers in the English top flight I have seen.

Rush is Liverpool’s all time greatest ever goalscorer with 346 goals in all competitions.

Shearer scored an incredible 283 league goals in the top tiers (First Division and EPL) for Southampton, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United, and well over 350 club goals in all competition.

He ended his international career prematurely so that he could concentrate on club football, having scored 30 goals in 63 appearances for England.

Marco Van Basten was the stand-out striker on the international front in the mid to late 1980s and into the early 1990s.

Netherlands hero Van Basten scored 218 goals in the Eredivisie and Serie A with Ajax and Milan respectively, and over 300 career goals in total, before playing his last ever game at the age of 28 in 1993 due to a serious injury.

Raul became a legend for Real Madrid and Spain. He scored 323 goals for Real between 1994 and 2010, plus 44 goals for the national side.

Romario was a World Cup winner with Brazil in 1994. He scored 55 goals in 70 appearances for his country.

In a career spanning just over 20 years, Romario scored 582 League goals and well over 700 in total.

Brazilian Ronaldo graced the colours of such great teams as Barcelona, Real Madrid, Internazionale and Milan. He scored 280 league goals in 384 career games.

Ronaldo was the star of Brazil’s 2002 World Cup winning side. He retired having scored 62 goals in 98 games for Brazil.

Everyone on the planet knows that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are living (and still playing) footballing icons. I’m not even going to bother boring you all with their record busting goal ratios for both club and country.

We are just privileged to have had these two geniuses around, from the noughties all the way through to the present day.

You will also notice that I haven’t referred to the countless ballon d’ors and FIFA Player of the Year awards that a few of the players above have regularly collected.

I have kept the greatest goalscorer of the lot in my lifetime for last.

Mere words cannot describe how good Gerd Muller was, or really do him justice, so I am just going to reel off a few statistics.

‘Der Bomber’ as he was affectionately known as to a whole nation, scored a truly sensational 68 goals in 62 appearances for West Germany.

He won the Golden Boot at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico with 10 goals. In the same year he was named European Footballer of the Year and won the ballon d’or.

Gerd Muller scored the winning goal in the 1974 World Cup Final as the host nation came from behind to defeat the Johan Cruyff inspired Dutch Masters from the Netherlands.

Muller scored 365 Bundesliga goals in 427 appearances for Bayern Munich and won the European Cup with Bayern three years on the bounce, 1973/74 to 1975/76 inclusive.

Muller finished his career having scored 487 goals in 555 league games.

That included a record 32 Bundesliga hat-tricks, plus 65 goals in 74 European games for Bayern.

All the players above are immortal in the fine and unique artistry of goalscoring and have undoubtedly given me and millions of other people, great pleasure over the years watching the game we all love.