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Who will win this year?
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The Champions League has reached the business end of the competition with just four clubs’ dreams of lifting the most prestigious club trophy in football. It’s poised to be two incredible semi-finals with Arsenal taking on Atlético Madrid and Bayern Munich battling PSG. The clash between reigning champions PSG and the all-conquering Bayern is expected to be significantly more entertaining than the meeting between two purveyors of the dark arts in Mikel Arteta and Diego Simeone.
Nevertheless, Arsenal and Atletico remain fearsome opponents and they’ll both have aspirations of winning the Champions League this season. The semi-finals are notoriously epic affairs and the stage where some iconic players have truly stepped up to confirm their reputations as the best players in the world. Therefore, we’ve delved through the Transfermarkt database to show which players have scored the most goals in Champions League semi-finals.
Champions League semi-finals record goalscorers
We’ve analysed the data since the European Cup was rebranded to the Champions League in 1992 and unsurprisingly, Cristiano Ronaldo is the top goalscorer. The Real Madrid and Manchester United legend netted 13 goals in 21 semi-final games and no player has made more appearances in the last four of the competition. As the graphic below illustrates, Karim Benzema ranks second with eight goals in 18 semi-final appearances with Robert Lewandowski in third.
The Poland international’s strike rate of seven goals in ten games is very impressive and it arrived across spells at three clubs; Borussia Dortmund, Bayern and Barcelona. Lionel Messi is arguably the greatest player in history but he wasn’t as effective in the semi-finals of the Champions League with six goals in 15 games. Some iconic players feature in the list above, including Zinédine Zidane, Thomas Müller and Alessandro Del Piero.
