The Highest-Scoring Champions League Matches Analyst
Which match holds the record for the most goals in a UEFAChampions Leaguegame? We list the highest-scoring matches in the competition's history.
There have been 15 games in which nine or more goals have been scored since the competition's rebrand in 1992, and 26.7% of them have come in the new league format that was introduced for the 2024-25 season. Whether or not the 36-team league phase has anything to do with this happening is a discussion for another day.
We're just here to report on the numbers. (Further down we'll stop pretending football started in 1992 and reveal the highest-scoring game in the European Cup, too.
) 12 Goals Borussia Dortmund 8-4 Legia Warsaw 22 November 2016 Leading Group F heading into Matchday 5 of the 2016-17 season, Borussia Dortmund hosted Legia Warsaw, a team they had already beaten 6-0 in Poland earlier on in the campaign. They went a goal down early on, opening the door for Real Madrid to sneak into first position in the group with one game to play.
But Dortmund struck three times in four minutes through two goals from Shinji Kagawa and one from Nuri Sahin to take the lead, before conceding anotherandadding another two before half-time. At 5-2 at the break, this was the joint-highest-scoring first half in Champions League history.
The action didn't stop in the second half, though, with five more goals arriving to complete a remarkable game that remains the highest-scoring match in Champions League history. Dortmund held off Real Madrid to finish top of the group, but they only made the quarter-finals in the end.
Madrid, meanwhile, predictably recovered to win the competition yet again. 11 Goals Monaco 8-3 Deportivo La Coruña 5 November 2003 On their way to the final - where they would lose to José Mourinho's Porto - Monaco won Group A, with their group stage including this frankly bizarre 8-3 victory over eventual semi-finalists Deportivo La Coruña.
Just two weeks after a 1-0 win for Deportivo in the return game in Spain, back on home soil, Monaco raced into a 4-0 lead inside half an hour, with a further three goals scored before half-time as the hosts took a 5-2 lead into the break. Incredibly, three more goals were added before the 52nd minute to leave Monaco leading 7-3, yet only one more goal was scored in the final 38 minutes of the game, with Édouard Cissé scoring the eighth for the hosts.
Monaco scored more goals in this one match than in their five other group-stage games combined (seven), while Deportivo let in twice as many goals as they did in their other five matches in total (four). Dado Prso scored half of Monaco's goals in this match, becoming just the third player to score as many as four goals in a Champions League game after Marco van Basten (November 1992 for Milan vs IFK Göteborg) and Simone Inzaghi (March 2000 for Lazio vs Marseille).