In the Round of 32 of the 2026 World Cup, Belgium beat Senegal with a goal from Youri Tielemans in the 120+5th minute — the last possible gasp before penalties. That goal didn't just decide the match: it officially became the latest goal ever scored in World Cup history.
Before Tielemans, the closest record had stood for twenty years: Alessandro Del Piero's 120+1 in the Germany 2006 semifinal.
Tielemans' goal is a good excuse for something this site already has fully mapped out: the distribution of every World Cup goal in history by the exact minute it was scored. With Belgium's goal included, the total count reaches 3,027 goals — own goals included.
The single minute with the most goals in history is, unsurprisingly, the 90th, with 143 — the urgency of the closing minutes concentrates goals like no other moment of the match. The 45th follows, with 65. But the interesting part is the rest of the top 10: of the ten minutes with the most goals scored in history, eight belong to the second half (90, 75, 89, 73, 55, 80, 83, and 88), and only the 45th and a tie between the 18th and 44th minutes — both with exactly 42 goals — represent the first half.
Looking at full periods instead, here's how all 3,027 goals in history break down:
| Period | Goals |
|---|---|
| First half (min. 1-45) | 1,233 |
| First-half stoppage time (45+) | 40 |
| Second half (min. 46-90) | 1,571 |
| Second-half stoppage time (90+) | 105 |
| First extra time (min. 91-105) | 36 |
| First extra-time stoppage (105+) | 1 |
| Second extra time (min. 106-120) | 37 |
| Second extra-time stoppage (120+) | 4 |
Grouped differently: 92.6% of every goal in history (2,804 of 3,027) has been scored in regulation time — split fairly evenly between the first half (1,233) and the second (1,571), which remains, by a solid margin, the highest-scoring period of a World Cup match. Extra time, both halves combined, adds up to just 73 goals across all of history. And the four types of stoppage time together — first half, second half, and the two extra-time periods — account for 150 goals, most of them (105) in those final minutes of the second half that so often decide a match.
Tielemans' goal, then, isn't just a curious footnote from the 2026 World Cup — it's the most extreme point on a distribution that can already be explored in full, match by match and minute by minute, any time.
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