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Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland made goalscoring starts to the 2026-27 Champions League campaign on Tuesday. Both will have one eye on the competition’s all-time goals record. The Champions League returned for 2026-27 on Tuesday with some familiar faces doing some familiar things. José Mourinho was back in the big time and guided Real Madrid to victory without having much of the ball. Meanwhile, Manchester City won comfortably at Porto. But most expected of all the events across the six games were the goals scored by superstars Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland. Mbappé opened the scoring with a well-taken finish after pouncing on Yann Bisseck’s mistake to set Madrid on their way to a 2-1 win over Inter, while Haaland struck twice to hand City a 2-0 victory in Portugal. But as well as helping ensure their teams made winning starts to their league-phase campaigns for 2026-27, the goals also meant both players edged further up the Champions League top-scorers’ list. Since the rebrand of the competition in 1992, they are both in the top seven players for goals scored. Mbappé is still just 27 years old, while Haaland is even younger at 26, so both could quite feasibly be playing in the competition for the next 10 years. They may not keep up the frankly ridiculous rates at which they have scored Champions League goals so far for another decade, but both may well have their eyes on Cristiano Ronaldo’s record of 140 goals. Mbappé is currently joint fifth in the list, his goal on Tuesday taking him level with Madrid legend Raúl on 51 UCL goals, though he reached that figure in 99 games, compared to 142 for the Spaniard. Mbappé is averaging a Champions League goal every 112.4 minutes, which is the sixth-best rate among the 27 players with at least 30 goals in the competition. Haaland is further down the goalscoring charts, but he has time on his side and he is scoring at a quicker rate than anyone has before in the competition’s history. He is in seventh place on 59 goals from just 59 games, averaging a goal every 79.7 minutes, which is unsurprisingly the best rate by far of any player in the above group. Lionel Messi comes closest to challenging Haaland here, having scored every 105.3 minutes in the competition during his career. So, what chance do these two goal machines have of catching Ronaldo? The Portuguese forward scored his 140 goals from 183 games, scoring every 113.9 minutes on average. That rate is almost exactly the same as Mbappé’s, suggesting the Frenchman will need to get close to Ronaldo’s appearance total in the competition if he is to challenge this particular record. He has already played 99 games, meaning he needs another 84 appearances to match Ronaldo’s 183, which also happens to be a competition record. But Mbappé has the advantage of the Champions League having been expanded to mean a minimum of eight games for any team who reaches the league phase and a maximum of 17 for the finalists. As such, it is possible – though obviously extremely unlikely – for Mbappé to play those 84 UCL games in the next five seasons. If he continues scoring at his current rate, he could break Ronaldo’s record in the 2030-31 Champions League final. That would require Madrid (or whichever club(s) Mbappé plays for) to make it to the final and play in the play-off round in each of the next five seasons, so it will likely take him an extra couple of seasons to play enough games. That could mean Mbappé breaks the Champions League goals record in seven years, by which time he will be 34. Taking into account a slowing down of his goalscoring in his mid-30s, he could have a buffer of a few years to catch Ronaldo. Haaland may be 12 goals behind Mbappé at the time of writing, but his exceptional goalscoring rate makes him more likely to challenge for first place in this list. And while he does have age on his side (as shown above), it’s his rate of a goal a game that puts him in pole position to break the record (as shown below). He will need another 82 matches to overtake Ronaldo, which, like Mbappé, could happen within the next five seasons. However, given City haven’t made it past the quarter-finals since winning the competition in 2022-23 and were even knocked out in the play-off round in 2024-25, there’s no counting on them going deep for five seasons running. If whoever Haaland is representing plays an average of 12 Champions League games per season (which would mean getting to the quarter-final without the play-off round, or the round of 16 via the play-off), he would need 6.83 seasons of scoring at his current rate. That would mean that 83% of the way through the 2033-34 season – which would be the round-of-16 second leg – Haaland would score the goal to make him the all-time Champions League top scorer. And as he is younger than Mbappé, he may also carry on scoring for longer than his rival for this particular prize. So, if these two keep on scoring like they have done already, we will see the race to become the Champions League’s record goalscorer come to a head in the mid 2030s. Something to look forward to, then. Enjoy this? Add Opta Analyst as a preferred source by clicking here. Subscribe to our football newsletter to receive exclusive weekly content. You should also follow our social accounts over on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.