Every World Cup hat trick in History

Scoring three goals in a single match is one of football's most celebrated individual feats. At a World Cup, it becomes something rarer still — a moment that separates a great player from a legendary one. Since Bert Patenaude opened the account in Uruguay in 1930, only 57 hat tricks have been recorded across 23 tournaments. This is the complete record, era by era, from the first to the most recent.

What is a hat trick and how is it defined in football

The term hat trick did not begin in football. It originates from nineteenth century cricket, where a bowler who dismissed three batsmen with three consecutive deliveries was awarded a hat by his club — a token of recognition for an exceptional feat. The phrase migrated into football during the late 1800s, and FIFA adopted a consistent definition for the World Cup: three goals scored by the same player in the same match, regardless of order or method.

Within that broad definition, football recognises several variations. A standard hat trick simply requires three goals in one game. A natural hat trick means three consecutive goals by the same player, with no teammate or opponent scoring in between. A perfect hat trick adds a further condition: one goal with the right foot, one with the left, and one with the head. The rarest of all is the flawless hat trick, which combines all three features at once. For the purposes of the historical record presented here, the FIFA standard applies throughout: three goals in a match, by one player, in the World Cup finals tournament itself.

One further distinction worth noting: goals scored in penalty shootouts do not count. The record reflects only goals scored during the ninety minutes of regulation and, where applicable, extra time.

Every World Cup hat trick from 1930 to 2026

The pioneering era (1930 to 1954)

The first two decades of the World Cup produced football at its most open and, at times, spectacularly high scoring. Defensive organisation as we understand it today barely existed. Goalkeepers operated with minimal protection from the laws of the game. The result was a tournament series where a single forward could dominate an afternoon and walk away with three, four, or even five goals to his name.

The inaugural tournament in 1930 produced three hat tricks across just 18 matches, a remarkable rate that reflects both the attacking nature of the football and the gulf in quality between the established nations and the newcomers. Bert Patenaude of the United States scored the first, all three goals in a 3-0 group stage win over Paraguay on 17 July. The feat went unrecognised for decades — conflicting match records led FIFA to formally credit Patenaude only in 2006, 76 years after the fact. Guillermo Stabile of Argentina and Pedro Cea of Uruguay followed in the same tournament, Cea's arriving in the semi-finals against Yugoslavia.

The 1934 and 1938 tournaments each contributed their share of remarkable performances. Ernst Wilimowski of Poland achieved something that still stands alone in the record books: a hat trick in a match his team lost. He scored four goals against Brazil in the 1938 round of 16, yet Poland still went home after a 6-5 defeat in extra time. The same match produced a hat trick for Leônidas of Brazil, meaning both sides had a player score three or more goals in a single game — the only time in World Cup history that has happened. The 1950 edition, played in Brazil without the usual knockout format, added two more with Óscar Míguez for Uruguay and Ademir for the host nation.

Then came Switzerland in 1954, and everything changed scale. Eight hat tricks were scored across a single tournament — a record that has never been matched and almost certainly never will be. The 1954 World Cup averaged 5.4 goals per match, the highest in the competition's history, and the quarter-final between Austria and Switzerland produced two hat tricks in the same game: Theodor Wagner for Austria and Josef Hügi for Switzerland in a match that ended 7-5, the highest-scoring knockout game the World Cup has ever produced. Sándor Kocsis of Hungary went further than anyone, scoring hat tricks in two consecutive group matches — nine goals in a 9-0 win over South Korea, then four more in an 8-3 demolition of West Germany. He finished the tournament with 11 goals, a total only Fontaine has since surpassed.

The golden age of forwards (1958 to 1970)

If the early decades were defined by quantity, the period from 1958 to 1970 gave the World Cup hat trick its mythology. These are the names that football has carried for generations: Pelé, Fontaine, Eusébio, Hurst, Müller. Each one scored a hat trick at a moment that mattered, and each one did so with a quality that the record alone cannot fully capture.

Just Fontaine's 1958 tournament in Sweden remains the most extraordinary individual scoring campaign in World Cup history. He finished with 13 goals in six matches, a record untouched after 68 years. Two of those matches produced hat tricks — a 7-3 group stage win over Paraguay and four goals in the third-place match against West Germany. He played the entire tournament in borrowed boots, his own pair having been damaged before the competition began. Pelé, 17 years and 244 days old, scored three in the semi-final against France, becoming the youngest player ever to score a World Cup hat trick — and the only one to do so under the age of 18. Brazil won that tournament and Pelé scored twice in the final. It was the beginning of something the world had not seen before.

Eusébio's performance against North Korea in the 1966 quarter-finals carries a weight that statistics struggle to hold. Portugal were 3-0 down at half time. Eusébio scored four goals in the second half, turning the match into a 5-3 victory in what many still consider the greatest individual comeback in World Cup history. The same tournament gave football its most iconic hat trick: Geoff Hurst's three goals in the final against West Germany on 30 July 1966, the only hat trick in a World Cup final until Kylian Mbappé in 2022. The second goal, the one that bounced down off the crossbar and has been argued over ever since, belongs to a category of sporting moments that transcends the competition itself.

Gerd Müller of West Germany produced his two hat tricks in Mexico in 1970 across back-to-back group matches — 5-2 against Bulgaria and 3-1 against Peru, with just three days between them. He finished the tournament with 10 goals. Müller finished his World Cup career with 14, a record that stood until Miroslav Klose surpassed it in 2014. The era also brought Carlos Alberto Torres of Brazil, the captain who lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy that summer, onto the hat trick list in the same group stage.

Note: Ivanov's hat trick opponent and scoreline are confirmed from the group stage; the full match records for 1962 can be explored in the Historical Soccer World Cup section.

The 1974 to 1990 generation

The expansion of the World Cup to 24 teams in 1982 brought more matches, more variety of opposition, and a new wave of individual performances. The period between 1974 and 1990 is defined by a particular kind of forward — technically assured, physically imposing, and capable of imposing himself on a match even when the tactical context was becoming increasingly structured.

Poland's Andrzej Szarmach opened the era in 1974 with three goals in a 7-0 demolition of Haiti, in a group stage that saw Yugoslavia's Dušan Bajević do the same to Zaire two days earlier. The 1978 tournament produced two hat tricks that share a detail: both Rob Rensenbrink of the Netherlands and Teófilo Cubillas of Peru scored their trebles against Iran, and both included two penalties. Rensenbrink's three goals came in a 3-0 win; Cubillas, whose 10 World Cup goals across three tournaments placed him among the great South American strikers of his era, scored his in a 4-1 victory. The Iranian defence had an unhappy week.

The 1982 edition in Spain stands out for László Kiss, who came on as a substitute for Hungary against El Salvador and scored three goals in seven minutes and 42 seconds — the fastest hat trick in World Cup history, and the only one ever scored by a player who started the game on the bench. Paolo Rossi's hat trick against Brazil in the second group stage is one of the most consequential in the tournament's history: Italy were eliminated by a defeat and went on to win the whole thing. The 1986 tournament in Mexico produced four hat tricks, more than any edition since 1954, with Emilio Butragueño of Spain scoring four against Denmark in a round of 16 tie that remains one of the great individual performances of the modern era. Igor Belanov of the USSR matched Wilimowski's misfortune by scoring a hat trick in a 4-3 extra-time defeat to Belgium — three goals and still out.

Note: Schillaci's exact hat trick match details require verification against the site database before publication.

The Batistuta era (1994 to 2002)

No player in the history of the World Cup has scored a hat trick at two separate editions of the tournament. Gabriel Batistuta did it twice. At the 1994 World Cup in the United States he scored three against Greece on 21 June, completing the treble with a penalty. Exactly four years later, on 21 June 1998, he scored three against Jamaica, completing it with a penalty again. Both opponents were making their World Cup debut. Both times, Argentina won the match comfortably. The symmetry is almost too precise to feel accidental.

The same 1994 edition produced Oleg Salenko's extraordinary afternoon against Cameroon: five goals in a single match, the highest individual tally in the competition's history. Russia won 6-1. Salenko shared the Golden Boot with Hristo Stoichkov of Bulgaria and never played for Russia again. His six goals in that tournament remain his only international goals. Christian Vieri scored three against Cameroon at the 1998 tournament in France, where Batistuta completed his second historic hat trick. The 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan saw Miroslav Klose score three against Saudi Arabia — his first World Cup goals, the opening instalment of what would become the most prolific individual record in the tournament's history — and Pedro Pauleta add three against Poland for Portugal.

Note: Stoichkov's hat trick match details require verification against the site database before publication. The Golden Boot he shared with Salenko is confirmed.

The modern era (2010 to 2022)

The hat trick did not disappear from the modern World Cup, but it became rarer and, when it arrived, more significant. Defensive organisation had tightened across every confederation. The gap between the strongest nations and the weakest narrowed steadily. Scoring three goals in a match at a World Cup became an event that demanded attention in a way it simply had not in the age of 8-0 and 9-0 group stage thrashings.

Gonzalo Higuaín scored three against South Korea at the 2010 tournament in South Africa, in a 4-1 group stage win that announced Argentina's attacking ambition even if the trophy ultimately eluded them. Four years later in Brazil, Thomas Müller scored three against Portugal in a 4-0 demolition that signalled Germany's readiness for what became a title-winning campaign. Xherdan Shaqiri of Switzerland added a hat trick against Honduras in the same group stage. The 2018 tournament in Russia produced two of the most memorable hat tricks of the modern era: Cristiano Ronaldo scored three against Spain in a 3-3 group stage draw, his third goal a free-kick in the 88th minute that has become one of the most replayed moments in World Cup history, and Harry Kane completed a treble against Panama in England's 6-1 win that briefly made the nation dare to dream. Ronaldo's hat trick made him, at the time, the oldest player ever to score one at a World Cup.

The 2022 tournament in Qatar produced three hat tricks, the most of any edition since 2014. Gonçalo Ramos scored three on his first World Cup start against Switzerland in the round of 16, one of the great individual debuts in the competition's history. Kylian Mbappé then did something only Geoff Hurst had done before: he scored a hat trick in the final. France lost to Argentina on penalties after a 3-3 draw. Mbappé's performance in defeat was one of the most astonishing in the history of the occasion, and it brought him level with Hurst as the only players to score a hat trick in a World Cup final.

The 2026 tournament

The 2026 World Cup had been under way for less than 48 hours when it delivered two hat tricks in quick succession, each carrying its own weight of history. On 16 June, Lionel Messi scored three against Algeria in Argentina's opening group match, a performance that moved him to 16 World Cup goals — level with Miroslav Klose as the all-time leading scorer in the competition's history. At 38 years old, he became the oldest player ever to score a World Cup hat trick, surpassing the record Ronaldo had held since 2018. For a player who had waited until his fifth World Cup to lift the trophy in 2022, adding another historic milestone in what is widely expected to be his final tournament carried an emotional weight that statistics alone cannot measure.

Two days later, Jonathan David of Canada scored three against Qatar in a 6-0 group stage victory in Vancouver. It was Canada's first win in World Cup history. David completed his hat trick in stoppage time, becoming the first player from a host nation to score a hat trick at a World Cup since Geoff Hurst in 1966, and the first player from a Serie A club to do so since 1998. For a nation that had waited decades to simply qualify for the tournament, a 6-0 win with a home hat trick on opening matchday represented something far beyond the scoreline.

Why hat tricks are so rare at a World Cup

The quality of opposition makes everything harder

A domestic league hat trick is a remarkable achievement. A World Cup hat trick is something categorically different. Every team at the tournament has passed through qualification — a process that eliminates the weakest opposition and guarantees that even the group stage opponents carry genuine international pedigree. The defenders a forward faces on a Wednesday in the group stage may well be the same players who have frustrated him in European club football for years. There is no easy game, and there is no easy opponent.

The concentration of defensive quality at a World Cup is unlike any other competition. When a forward arrives in a group stage match, he faces a backline organised by a coaching staff who have spent months studying his movement, his preferred zones, his runs in behind. The tactical information available to national team coaches has transformed the preparation process beyond recognition. Scoring once against that level of preparation and that quality of opponent is hard. Scoring three times in the same afternoon is the kind of thing that happens 57 times in 96 years of competition.

Time and opportunity are brutally limited

A player at a World Cup has, at most, seven matches to make his mark. Many forwards — even great ones — arrive in peak form and find the tournament structured in a way that denies them the moments they need. Teams that go ahead by two goals in the group stage often protect the result rather than chase a third; knockout football brings its own version of that calculation. The windows in which a hat trick becomes possible are genuinely narrow, and they depend as much on the match situation as on the individual quality of the forward.

The physical and rotational demands of the tournament add further complexity. A forward who scores twice in the group stage may find himself rested for the third match, or substituted before the hour is up to manage his workload for the knockout rounds. Just Fontaine's 13 goals in six games in 1958 required him to play every minute of every match. That kind of sustained, uninterrupted opportunity is almost impossible to guarantee at the modern World Cup.

Pressure and the weight of the occasion

There is a version of pressure at the World Cup that has no equivalent anywhere else in football. The tournament happens once every four years. For many players, it represents the only chance they will have to perform on this stage. That psychological weight reshapes how matches are played, how risks are taken, and how individual decisions are made in the moments that matter most. Elite forwards who score freely at club level can find themselves caught between the caution the occasion demands and the aggression their game requires.

What makes the hat tricks in this record so compelling is precisely how many of them defied that pressure rather than succumbed to it. Pelé did it at 17. Eusébio did it from 3-0 down. Hurst did it in a final. Messi did it in what may be his last World Cup, at 38, with everything already proved and nothing left to win except the moment itself. Each hat trick on this list is a small argument against the idea that the World Cup is too big a stage for individual brilliance. 57 times in 96 years, one player proved it wrong.

Explore more of the history behind these moments across the full Historical Soccer World Cup section, or trace how individual scoring records have evolved through our all-time World Cup top scorers page.