With Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund set to lock horns in a titanic UEFA Champions League final this weekend at Wembley Stadium, here are the 12 most prolific players in the history of arguably European club football's biggest match.
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The Wembley arch will serve as the backdrop of European club football's largest game of the season as Los Blancos and Die Schwarzgelben do battle in the English capital to see who will be crowned the champions of the continent for the 2023/24 season.
There will be plenty of big players looking to make a name for themselves in London this Saturday, and perhaps there is no better way to do that then to find the back of the net.
Of the players who will be playing in the final this weekend, only Real's Vinicius Junior has previously scored in the fixture. That goal came in Los Merengues' last appearance in the decider in 2022, and should he score again, he will become the 11th player to have scored at least two goals in the final in the Champions League era.
As far as Africa is concerned, only one player from the continent has scored multiple Champions League final goals, and that is Samuel Eto'o. Like Vinicius, Eto'o's first UCL final goal came in Paris at the expense of an English side when he netted the equaliser for Barcelona in their 2-1 come-from-behind victory against Arsenal in the 2005/06 final at the Stade de France.
Here are the players who have scored the most goals in UEFA Champions League finals, as per the competition's official website:
He would return three years later to Europe's biggest club stage to haunt another Premier League side, opening the scoring for the Blaugrana in the 2008/09 final in their 2-0 victory over Manchester United at the Stadio Olimpico.
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The only two players who have scored more than two Champions League final goals both famously played for the tournament's record winners in Madrid. In second place is Gareth Bale. The Welshman's arrival at the Santiago Bernabeu was soon followed by the Spanish giants claiming "La Decima" in the 2013/14 final when they defeated crosstown rivals Atletico Madrid 4-1 in Lisbon, justifying his tag as the world's most expensive footballer at the time.
The winger would play in the fixture on two more occasions before finding the back of the net once again in the Champions League final. Bale came off the bench in the 2017/18 edition to score two spectacular goals that helped ensure that Real won 3-1 against Liverpool and capture their 13th European Cup.
While the Cardiff native's efforts on the European stage made him a legend for the newly crowned Spanish champions, perhaps no other player is more synonymous with Real and the Champions League than Cristiano Ronaldo. The iconic Portuguese forward has scored 140 goals in the 183 games he has played in the tournament, and four of those strikes have come in the competition's most decisive game.
He was first able to score in a final while playing for Manchester United in the 2007/08 edition, when he gave the Red Devils the lead against Chelsea in Moscow. He would go on to help deliver long-awaited European success in the Spanish capital, winning four more UCL trophies while being a Madrid player. Of the four finals he played while being a Madridista, he scored in two of them. The first of his UCL final goals for Real came in the spectacle that captured them La Decima as he scored the fourth goal.
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Three years later, he became the first Real player in the Champions League era to score multiple goals in a final when he bagged a brace in the tournament's 2016/17 iteration, scoring in their 4-1 victory over Juventus.
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