Ask someone to name players who have scored in four different World Cups, and they'll almost certainly say Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — maybe Pelé or Miroslav Klose, if they know their World Cup history well. Almost nobody is going to say Ivan Perišić. And yet the Croatian winger belongs to that exact same club — one of the most exclusive in football.
Perišić scored at Brazil 2014, at Russia 2018 — including a goal in the final against France, making him the first Croatian to ever score in a World Cup final — at Qatar 2022, and did it again at the 2026 World Cup. Four different editions, spanning more than a decade. Only five other players in history have managed to score in four different World Cups: Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Pelé, Miroslav Klose, and Uwe Seeler.
The company couldn't be more select: two of the greatest goalscorers of all time (Messi and Klose), two absolute legends of the game (Pelé and Cristiano), a Brazilian icon (Neymar), and a historic German striker from the 1960s (Seeler). Perišić, a player who rarely makes headlines outside Croatia, shares this exact stat with every one of them.
There's another detail that flies even further under the radar: at the 2026 World Cup, Perišić also added an assist — making him the second player in history with at least one goal and one assist in four different World Cups, a record that until then belonged to Messi alone.
No other Croatian has scored across as many editions of the tournament. Perišić has spent more than a decade quietly being one of the most consistent players in recent World Cup history — simply without the spotlight that other names on this same list have always had on them.
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