List of FIFA World Cup hat-tricks saw 330x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

The FIFA World Cup is an international association football competition established in 1930. It is contested by the men's national teams of the members of the FIFA, the sport's global governing body. The tournament has taken place organised every four years, except in 1942 and 1946, when the competition was cancelled due to World War II. A hat-trick occurs when a player scores three or more goals in a single match and it is considered an achievement, especially while playing at the largest international football tournament in the world. Across the over 1,000 matches at the 23 tournaments of the FIFA World Cup, 58 hat-tricks have been scored. The first hat-trick was scored by Bert Patenaude of the United States, playing against Paraguay in 1930; the most recent was by Bukayo Saka of England, playing against France on 18 July 2026. The only World Cup not to have at least one hat-trick scored was the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany. The record number of hat-tricks in a single World Cup tournament is eight, during the 1954 FIFA World Cup in Switzerland.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "List of FIFA World Cup hat-tricks", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 8 edits to this article on 2026-06-17, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• List
• Notable World Cup hat-tricks

What changed that day

The article grew by 103 characters that day. The largest single addition was 270 characters to List. See everything that changed on 2026-06-17 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.