List of footballers with 500 or more goals is drawing 12x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

In top-level association football competitions, 27 players have scored 500 or more goals in both club and international football, according to research by the IFFHS, first published in 2007. Taking into account competitions of all levels, 82 players have reached the milestone, according to the RSSSF. FIFA, the international governing body of football, has never released a list detailing the highest goalscorers and does not keep official records. It is challenging for statisticians and media to agree on which goals should be counted, with debate over whether to include those scored in friendlies, regional competitions, and even matches taking place during wartime. Hungarian Imre Schlosser is generally recognised as the first to reach the 500-goal mark, doing so in 1927 shortly before his retirement. Nine players have accomplished the feat at a single club: Josef Bican, Jimmy Jones (Glenavon), Jimmy McGrory (Celtic), Joe Bambrick (Linfield), Lionel Messi (Barcelona), Gerd Müller, Pelé (Santos), Fernando Peyroteo, and Uwe Seeler (Hamburg). Of these nine, Messi scored the most, with 672 goals between his debut in 2004 and his departure in 2021.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "List of footballers with 500 or more goals", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-06-23, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Footballers with 500 or more goals

What changed that day

The article grew by 2 characters that day. The largest single addition was 2 characters to Footballers with 500 or more goals. See everything that changed on 2026-06-23 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.