How Harry Kane’s historic 2025-26 compares to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’s best-ever seasons

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2 July 2026

Harry Kane

’s two goals against DR Congo not only rescued

England

from an embarrassing

World Cup

exit but further pushed him up the goalscoring charts.

Following a record-breaking season with

Bayern Munich

, Kane has picked up where he left off and even

Cristiano Ronaldo

cannot claim to have scored as many goals in a campaign as the

captain has.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s best-ever goal-scoring season came in 2011-12 when he hit 69 goals for club and country.

That was the year Madrid reached 100 points to wrestle the title away from Barcelona with Ronaldo’s 46 Liga goals helping to do just that. Amazingly, that was not even his best for Madrid as he scored 48 goals in the 2014-15 season.

In the Champions League, Ronaldo had a one-for-one ratio with 10 goals in 10 games, and he scored four in Spain’s other competitions.

For Portugal, that season preceded the Euros and Ronaldo scored three goals as his country reached the semi-finals.

Kane, though, has taken that tally and smashed it with potentially many more games to come.

For

Bayern

, Kane had a better than a goal-a-game ratio in the Bundesliga, Champions League and DFB Pokal.

In the league, Kane scored 36 goals in 31 games while in the Champions League he hit 14 in 13 matches. His cup record is even better with a silly 10 goals in six games.

He also bagged one in the DFL Supercup taking his total club goal tally up to 61 for the season.

With

, Kane netted one in a friendly ahead of the

and has scored in all but one game of the tournament so far.

He opened his account with two against Croatia and while

were frustrated with a goalless draw against Ghana, Kane scored in the final group match against Panama.

His two goals against DR Congo pushed him to 72 goals for the season, making him the second-highest scorer in a season since 2000.

But there is, of course, someone else at the top. If you had not guessed by now,

Lionel Messi

is the man at the very top of this list.

We all know about the 91 goals Messi scored in 2012 and so it should come as little surprise that it was part of his best-ever goalscoring season.

Messi’s numbers for the 2011-12 campaign are simply ridiculous. In 37 La Liga games, he scored 50 goals. For comparison, that is double what Ronaldo Nazario scored for Real Madrid in the 2003-04 season.

In the Champions League, he hit 14 in 11 as Barcelona reached the semi-finals and he bagged nine in other competitions.

For Argentina, he scored 10 more, taking his final tally to an outstanding 82 goals.

Kane could, in theory, beat that but would need to score 11 in the four possible games

have left in the

. Good luck with that.

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