Scoring goals is not limited to strikers. Any player in any position can help his team achieve victory by scoring against opponents.
But when this happens by goalkeepers, things take other turns that combine excitement, fun, surprise, and strangeness as well, and the history of football is full of such things, the most recent of which was the goal scored by the Italian Ivan Provedel for Lazio against Atletico Madrid in the group stage of the Champions League, which Through which he saved his team from losing in stoppage time.
Crazy! 🤯
Lazio goalkeeper surprises Atletico Madrid and scores a goal in time.#Champions League | #Lazio | #Atletico Madrid pic.twitter.com/3hJqUPwbG6
— beIN SPORTS (@beINSPORTS) September 19, 2023
In fact, such shots do not happen very often, but this does not prevent the presence of goalkeepers who have goals tallies that exceed what strikers score.
In the following lines, we highlight the 10 goalkeepers who scored the most goals in the history of football, one of whom managed to score more than 100 times, according to the British website “Give Me Sport”:
10- Dragan Pantelic (26 goals)
Throughout his football career, Pantelic scored 26 goals, including 15 during 10 seasons with the Serbian team Radnicki Nice, where he averaged 1.5 goals per season. His most notable goal came against FK Velez Mostar during the local league, which he scored from a long throw. From his penalty area, it settled into the opposing team’s net.
During his professional career in France, Pantelic scored for the Bordeaux team, and he also has two goals for the Yugoslav national team in 23 international matches.
9- Misel Alfaro (31 goals)
Alvaro scored 31 goals in his football career, only 11 of them from the penalty spot, and all of them came in the shirt of the clubs he played for. He did not succeed in giving the El Salvador national team any goal in 42 international matches, and Alvaro retired in 2010 after suffering a serious neck injury.
8- Fernando Patterson (35 goals)
Costa Rican Patterson spent the majority of his professional career with the Guatemalan club Exlago, with whom he scored 14 goals. In 2013, the International Federation of Football History and Statistics approved his goals scored in international matches, and this is the secret of his goal tally rising to 35.
7- Hans Jorg Butt (37 goals)
The German goalkeeper celebrated scoring 37 goals throughout his football career, 21 of which were with the German club Hamburg, 8 with Bayer Leverkusen, 6 for Oldenburg, one goal with Bayern Munich, and the same with the youth team of the Bavarian giant.
Ois guide on the market, Hans Jörg Butt! 🥳#MiaSanMia #FCBayern pic.twitter.com/zHa8wgGRYu
— FC Bayern München (@FCBayern) May 28, 2021
Jorg Butt is distinguished as the goalkeeper who has scored the most goals in the Champions League, scoring 3 goals, all against Juventus, but with 3 different clubs: Hamburg, Leverkusen, and Bayern Munich.
6- Marcio Santos Souza (40 goals)
Marcio scored 34 goals in 532 matches he played with the Brazilian team Atletico Goianense, and added 3 more goals with Goias, Ipatinga and Goiania, then he retired in 2019 at the age of 38 years.
5- Johnny Vegas Fernandez (41 goals)
The Peruvian goalkeeper scored 41 goals, most of them from penalty kicks, but he succeeded in scoring against opponents 9 times from open play. During his professional career, Fernandez represented 15 different clubs, most notably Peruvian Sport Boys, before he retired in 2017.
4- Dimitar Ivankov (42 goals)
Ivankov defended the Bulgarian national team in 64 international matches, but he did not score a single goal in them, so all his goals came in the colors of the clubs he played for, which were Levski Sofia of Bulgaria, Kayserispor and Bursaspor of Turkey, and Anorthosis Famago of Cyprus before he retired from playing in 2011.
3- Rene Higuita (43 goals)
He is one of the most famous goalkeepers in the world, not only because of the goals he scored, but also the way he saved balls. Perhaps his most notable shot was when he blocked Jamie Redknapp’s ball in a scorpion-like manner during the Colombia-England match in 1995.
Higuita was not satisfied with this madness, but he scored 43 goals in his football career, 3 of which were at the international level, and most of his goals came from penalty kicks and direct free kicks.
2- Jose Luis Chilavert (67 goals)
He is the only goalkeeper in history to score 3 goals in one match (a hat-trick), all of which came from penalty kicks for his former team Velez Sarsfield against Ferro Carril Oeste in 1999 in the Argentine League.
During his professional career, Chilavert played 803 matches between clubs and the national team, during which he scored 67 goals, 8 of which were with the Paraguay national team.
Rogerio Ceni (129 goals)
He is the only goalkeeper in the world whose score exceeded 100 goals, as he scored 129 times in more than a thousand matches with his team, Sao Paulo, by taking penalty kicks, in addition to his extreme proficiency in taking direct free kicks from outside the penalty area.
In March 2011, Ceni scored an amazing goal when he shot a ball into the net of Corinthians, Sao Paulo’s archrival.
