Where does Karim Benzema rank among the best French strikers of all time?

3. Just Fontaine

Just Fontaine came like a flash and left like a flash scoring 30 goals in only 21 appearances for Les Bleus. A ratio of 1.4 goals every match. He is the only player with more than 1 goal per game average among the top 20 scorers for France.

He also had 10 European Cup goals in eight appearances. Fontaine only knew how to deal in goals. And if it wasn’t for the career-ending injury that forced him to stop playing football, he would’ve been much higher up than the eighth spot on the list of highest goal scorers for France.

He was a prolific goal-scorer and his display in the 1958 World Cup is probably the best Individual-campaign of all time. He scored a total of 13 goals and only the legendary Gerd Muller, and Brazil’s phenomenon, Ronaldo, has been able to better it. Only those two players and, more recently, Germany’s Miroslav Klose became the only players with more World Cup goals than the legendary Fontaine. But all of them played more than one World Cup unlike him.

At the club level, Fontaine won four Ligue 1 titles, three with Reims and one with OGC Nice. He also won two French Cups, one with each club alongside being the top scorer in Ligue 1 twice in his career in 1957/58 and 1959/60.  He was famously voted as the best French player of the last 50 years by the French Football Federation back in 2003. He was a player to have done complete justice to the Striker’s position.