Mittag joins Wolfsburg: the record-breakers
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
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All-time European top scorer Anja Mittag has joined Wolfsburg from Paris Saint-Germain and is just one goal off becoming the first to 50, though Marta is not far behind.
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The all-time leading scorer in UEFA women's club competition, Anja Mittag, will aim to bring up her half-century of European goals with Wolfsburg after moving from Paris Saint-Germain on a two-year deal.
The 31-year-old – part of Germany's 2016 Olympic gold medal-winning squad – has 49 goals in the UEFA Women's Champions League and predecessor UEFA Women's Cup. She won two titles with first club Turbine Potsdam and also represented Swedish outfit Rosengård before a year at Paris.
At Wolfsburg, the forward will follow in the footsteps of former Potsdam and Germany team-mate Conny Pohlers, who ended her career with the Wolves. It was with the Lower Saxony club that she triumphed in the 2013 and 2014 finals and last season relinquished her title as competition top scorer to Mittag.
Meanwhile, Mittag's old Rosengård colleague Marta is only three goals behind and has now been joined at the Malmo club by the player fourth in the list, Lotta Schelin.
UEFA.com looks at the leading scorers since the UEFA Women's Cup began in 2001 and its rebranding eight years later.
1 Anja Mittag (Turbine Potsdam/Rosengård/Paris Saint-Germain/Wolfsburg) 49*
Mittag scored for Potsdam in the 2005 final against Djurgården and was also part of Turbine's 2010 win before her move to Sweden. Having switched to Paris a year ago, Mittag got her 49th goal in Europe back in Sweden at Örebro but was not able to get to 50 prior to her switch to Wolfsburg as a freshly-minted Olympic gold medallist. She has never struck fewer than three goals in any of her nine previous European campaigns.
2 Conny Pohlers (Turbine Potsdam/FFC Frankfurt/Wolfsburg) 48
Pohlers hit 14 goals en route to victory in Potsdam's debut season of 2004/05, a record since only matched by Margrét Lára Vidarsdóttir in 2008/09 and Frankfurt's Célia Šašić in 2014/15. After joining Frankfurt, Pohlers scored three goals in the 2008 final and added two more titles at Wolfsburg in her last two playing seasons of 2012/13 and 2013/14, her tally of four wins shared only by Viola Odebrecht. Pohlers's tally of 48 goals took just 45 appearances, ten fewer than Mittag needed to reach that tally.
3 Marta (Umeå/Tyresö/Rosengård) 46*
While Mittag moves on, Marta remains firmly at Rosengård and will be spearheading their 2016/17 European push. The Brazil striker was 18 when she made her European bow for Umeå, scoring in both legs of their 2003/04 semi-final win against Brøndby and three more in the two defeats of Frankfurt in the final. Surprisingly Marta has not lifted the trophy again, losing finals with Umeå in 2007 and 2008 and then in 2014 with Tyresö. Marta then got four goals in Rosengård's run to the 2014/15 quarter-finals and another five last season, including a round of 16 hat-trick against Verona.
4 Lotta Schelin (Lyon/Rosengård) 42*
Sweden striker Schelin – like Mittag, Marta and Nina Burger – may never have topped the scorers' chart but her consistent goal-getting was a feature of Lyon's campaigns in which they managed three titles in eight seasons. That included victories in 2011, 2012 and 2016, though oddly in four final appearances Schelin has never scored.
She bowed out from Lyon to return to Sweden after last season's final defeat of Wolfsburg, converting in the penalty shoot-out. By then she had overtaken Burger as the player with the most goals for a single club in this competition, moving on to 41 with strikes in both legs of the semi-final against Mittag's Paris. Schelin joined Rosengård in the summer and soon opened her European account there.
5 Nina Burger (Neulengbach) 40
Austria striker Burger made a bit of history in 2014/15 as she became the first player to score 40 goals for one team in UEFA women's club competition, having returned to Neulengbach from a spell in the United States with Houston Dash. Now with Sand in the German Frauen-Bundesliga.
6 Hanna Ljungberg (Umeå) 39
The single-club record had long been held by Ljungberg, and indeed the Sweden forward topped the all-time competition rankings for a decade from 2002/03, when she scored ten as Umeå secured their first title, until Pohlers finally overhauled her in 2012/13. Had injury not contantly disrupted and then finally ended Ljungberg's career in July 2009, she would surely still lead the table having scored at a rate of exactly one per game in Europe.
7 Inka Grings (Duisburg/Zürich) 38
Her loyalty to Duisburg means Grings did not play in Europe until their own victorious debut in 2008/09. She did hit the ground running with 12 in that campaign, including a final first-leg hat-trick at WFC Zvezda-2005. Grings continued to score freely and in 2010/11 topped the ranking with 13 goals. Grings switched to Zürich and added four more in 2012/13. Her 38 European goals came in only 29 games, a strike-rate typical for a career as a whole in which she scored more than 500 times for club and country. She is now coaching Duisburg.
Bubbling under
8 Camille Abily (Montpellier, Lyon) 36*
9 Margrét Lára Vidarsdóttir (Valur Reykjavik, Turbine Potsdam) 34 [from 21 games]
10 Kim Little (Hibernian, Arsenal) 32
*Current club playing in 2016/17 UEFA Women's Champions League
Clubs indicated only those who player represented in Europe, even if they did not score.