The Champions League's greatest ever goalscorers ranked from 'Overrated' to 'GOAT'

From Cristiano Ronaldo to Lionel Messi and beyond, the Champions League has played host to some of the greatest goalscorers of all time across its decorated history.

Those legendary European nights under the floodlights with the iconic anthem blaring is enough to make any world-class striker want to ply their trade at a club competing in UEFA’s flagship competition.

In fact, so many brilliant centre forwards who would rightfully be considered amongst the most lethal in history have tested themselves in the Champions League that naming the greatest of all is no easy task.

Yes, you could literally just look at the list of players with the most goals in the tournament’s history, but there’s more to ranking and rating goalscorers than simply looking at the gross total of strikes.

How many games did it take for them to amass their tallies? What teams did they score the goals for? Did they score in key matches very often? Were they even number nines? The list goes on…

However, we’re always up for a difficult task at GIVEMESPORT, so we’ve decided to use our trusty medium of Tiermaker to rank the greatest goalscorers in Champions League history.

As we stride towards the business end of the 2021/22 campaign on the back of the quarter-final and semi-final draw, the time felt right to take a walkthrough of the tournament’s greats.

Taking every player to have scored 35 or more goals in the competition since its 1992 rebranding, we’ve organised the contenders in tiers ranging from ‘Overrated’ to ‘GOAT’ with three rungs in between.

While the final decisions are ultimately a matter of opinion, we will be factoring in all of the aforementioned questions that consider the player’s goal-per-game ratio, big-game performances and more when