The ten highest scoring teenagers in Champions League history: No Messi or Ronaldo…

Neither Lionel Messi nor Cristiano Ronaldo feature among the top 10 highest-scoring teenagers in Champions League history.

That’s a surprising truth given their superhuman career achievements and the fact that so many football stars have used Europe’s premier club competition as a springboard for their blossoming career.

If you’re good enough, you’re old enough. Here are the male players to have scored the most goals as teenagers in the Champions League.

10. Wlodzimiers Lubanski

The youngest player to ever appear for Poland and the country’s second-highest scorer behind Robert Lewandowski, Lubanski is still the Champions League’s youngest-ever scorer at 16 years and 258 days – a record that has stood since November 1963.

Lubanski was playing for Polish side Gornik Zabrze and scored against Dukla Prague. He never won the competition, but scored five times in it as a teenager from 14 appearances.

9. Yakubu Ayegbeni

Now recognised more for his Barclaysman status, ‘the Yak’ actually has a unique place in Champions League history as one of the competition’s most prolific teenagers.

He found form in the Champions League upon signing for Maccabi Haifa, including a penalty against Manchester United and a hat-trick against Olympiakos. It was that form which prompted a move to England with Portsmouth.

Yakubu managed five goals in just five games before leaving his teenage years.

8. Jude Bellingham

It feels like Bellingham has now been around scoring worldies and standing with his arms out beside him in celebration for years, when in actual fact he’s 21. Twenty-one.

He played 23 times as a teenager in the competition, scoring six goals from midfield with Borussia Dortmund after moving from Birmingham. He’s now in a tussle to win the Ballon d’Or with teammate Vinicius Junior. Time flies when you’re bloody good at football.

7. Raul

Real Madrid’s hometown hero, it somehow goes unappreciated as to exactly how good Raul was, for so long.

He scored six times in eight Champions League games as a teenager for Real Madrid, a swift start on his way to becoming the first player to score 50 goals in the competition and make over 100 appearances.

6. Karim Benzema

The legendary Frenchman burst onto the scene as a teenager at Lyon and that was represented in his start in the Champions League, bagging six goals from nine games before his teen years were over, including a goal on his competition debut.

It’s taken him a while to properly receive his flowers, but all these years later, Benzema is correctly remembered as one of the greatest modern forwards, playing facilitator to Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale at Real Madrid before becoming the main man and firing them to European glory himself in 2022.

Of the five Champions Leagues he won, his individual performances to clinch the final one make it the most memorable.

5. Zoran Filipovic

Breaking through at Red Star Belgrade in the early 1970s, Filipovic – a striker – scored six from just seven games as a teenager and went on to spend a decade with the club, winning the Yugoslav First League three times before moving to Club Brugge and later Benfica.

Filipovic never won the Champions League as a player or a manager, but did finish as top scorer in the UEFA Cup in 1983.

4. Patrick Kluivert

Seven goals from his 18 games as a teenager in the Champions League was merely the beginning of a joyous career for Kluivert.

The most important of those seven goals as a teenager was the one that won Ajax the Champions League in 1995, firing in the winner after 85 minutes against a star-studded Milan and becoming the youngest player to score in a Champions League final in the process.

Baller.

3. Ton Blanker

Remarkably, all seven of Blanker’s goals scored as a teenager while at Ajax came across just two games.

In the 1979-80 European Cup, where they reached the semi-final, he put four past HJK Helsinki and then bagged a hat-trick in the following round against Omonia.

That was his only real season at football’s top level, with him becoming somewhat of a journeyman after that and playing in Portugal, Spain, Belgium and the United States.

2. Erling Haaland

Scoring a first-half hat-trick on his Champions League debut for Red Bull Salzburg against Genk, Haaland looked like a special talent from that very first game and is yet to slow down.

He scored 10 goals as a teenager in the competition and bagged 12 goals in a single Champions League campaign as Manchester City won the trophy for the first time to complete the treble in 2022-23.

Freak.

1. Kylian Mbappe

He’s not won the competition yet which is ultimately what will frustrate him most, but a consolation for Mbappe is that he’s scored the most Champions League goals as a teenager with a rather astounding 13 from 23 games, which will take some beating.

Mbappe became the second-youngest Frenchman to score in the Champions League behind Benzema when he fired in a goal in Monaco’s 5-3 defeat away to City in 2017. That was the first of many and the beginning of an ascent to individual brilliance at Paris Saint-Germain.

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