Hat-trick Harry closing in on top five

Quite frankly, who else?  Given he is the Bundesliga’s all-time leading goalscorer with 365 goals in 427 top-filght games, you might have guessed the Bomber der Nation – the nation’s bomber – netted more than a single goal in quite a few matches.

In fact, he scored three or more goals twice as many times as anyone else has done in the history of the league since its foundation in 1963. He scored five goals on four separate occasions, including an incredible 7-4 win over Hertha Berlin in June 1976.

He netted exactly four goals no fewer than 10 times, featuring a quadruple in the 11-1 defeat of Borussia Dortmund in November 1971 that still ranks as the joint-highest scoring Bundesliga game ever.

Watch: The best strikers in Bundesliga history

And had he played in the modern era, Müller was convinced his stats would have been even more stratospheric.

“I would have scored more, a lot more," said Müller in 2010. "When a forward has the instinct and knows where the goal is, today he has a lot better chances."

He also argued a back four was easier to play against than the sweeper and two centre-backs he faced during his career: “One of the four is always sleeping, and that would have been great for me.”

2) Robert Lewandowski
Bundesliga clubs: Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich
3+ goal games: 16

While Müller said “the penalty area was my kingdom”, Lewandowski was a more complete player. His tally may well have been greater too had he not been used as a support striker in his early days at Dortmund, but when “Lewy” left the Bundesliga after 12 years in Germany, only Müller had – and still has – scored more top-flight goals than the Poland international.

His 312 league strikes were split between 74 in 131 matches for Dortmund and a barely credible 238 in 253 league games during eight outrageously prolific seasons at Bayern, including the 41 he got in 2020/21 to break Müller’s long-standing record for most goals in a single Bundesliga campaign.

Watch: Robert Lewandowski's 5 goals in 9 minutes

He scored more than three goals only twice: all four in a 4-3 win over Hertha in October 2020 and most memorably five in a world record eight minutes and 59 seconds after coming on at half-time to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 5-1 win over Wolfsburg on 22 September 2015.

"I can't really understand it. Five goals,” said a bewildered Pep Guardiola, who had witnessed his player’s fairytale feat from the Allianz Arena dugout as Bayern boss. “Neither as a coach nor as a player did I ever experience something like this and I can't really explain it.”

3) Mario Gómez
Bundesliga clubs: Stuttgart, Bayern Munich, Wolfsburg
3+ goal games: 12

After emerging as the spearhead of a young Stuttgart side that thrilled its way to the Bundesliga title in 2006/07, Gómez went on to score 170 German top-flight goals, the 11th-highest tally in the history of the division. But his talent for putting the ball in the back of the net did not always get the recognition it deserved.

“I felt like he was getting bedsores and you needed to flip him over,” said former Bayern and Germany midfielder-turned-pundit Mehmet Scholl of Gómez’s Euro 2012 performance against Portugal. “Mehmet once told me at Oktoberfest that he said that because he saw a lot of potential in me,” Gómez explained.

Watch: Mario Gómez's Top 3 goals

Scholl wasn’t wrong about that ability, nor was he the only one to spot it. In addition to being named Germany’s Footballer of the Year in 2007, Gómez finished the 2010/11 season with Bayern as the Bundesliga’s top scorer having netted five hat-tricks over the course of the league campaign.

He also scored four times in a Bundesliga match twice: Bayern’s 7-0 defeat of Freiburg in September 2011 and Stuttgart’s 4-1 defeat of his future employers Wolfsburg in May 2009

“Scoring a goal is an explosion of feelings,” Gómez wrote in The Players’ Tribune. “It’s there immediately — bam! Before you kick the ball, you feel like you’re 200 kilos. Then the ball leaves your foot, goes through the air and ripples the net. And for that moment, you’re weightless.”

3) Klaus Fischer
Bundesliga clubs: 1860 Munich, Schalke, Cologne, Bochum
3+ goal games: 12

Fischer’s first Bundesliga hat-trick came for 1860 Munich in a 4-3 defeat at Eintracht Frankfurt in November 1969; the remaining 11 times he scored three or more goals in a German top-flight game all came in the colours of Schalke, where Fischer’s name is still whispered with reverance to this day.

Of his 268 Bundesliga goals – a tally bettered only by Müller and Lewandowski – 182 came in 295 matches for the Gelsenkirchen club.

Fischer netted four goals in three Bundesliga games for Schalke, including the 7-0 win in Munich in October 1976 over the then-three-time defending European champions that remains Bayern’s biggest Bundesliga loss.

Watch: Klaus Fischer, Schalke's all-time top goalscorer

“I was a goalscorer from the start,” said Fischer, who began playing aged 11 in northern Bavaria, where he first started finding the back of the net at a prolific rate. “I was always a centre-forward and scored 70 to 80 goals a season back then.”

5) Manfred Burgsmüller
Bundesliga clubs: Rot-Weiss Essen, Borussia Dortmund, Kaiserslautern, Werder Bremen
3+ goal games: 10

With 213 goals in 447 Bundesliga games, Burgsmüller sits fifth on the Bundesliga’s all-time scoring chart, but is not a name most football fans would have heard of outside of his native country. However, his goalscoring talents are certainly still held in the highest esteem in Germany.

Seven of his multiple-goal games came during his seven-year spell at Dortmund (1976-’83) where he struck 135 times in 224 top-flight outings, including five in the 11-1 defeat of Arminia Bielefeld that sits joint-top of the chart of the Bundesliga’s highest-scoring encounters.

Watch: Manfred Burgsmüller - the original Bundesliga goalgetter

It took nearly 40 years for Burgsmüller to be overtaken – by Marco Reus – as Dortmund’s all-time leading scorer and he would surely have been better known had he won more than three caps for West Germany. Why so few? Fierce competition for places, undoubtedly, but perhaps also Burgsmüller’s outspoke attitude.

When national team coach Helmut Schön told Burgsmüller to “keep his feet on the carpet”, as you would say in German when advising someone to keep their feet on the ground, the then-Dortmund forward replied: “I thought we were playing on grass.”

5) Jupp Heynckes
Bundesliga clubs: Borussia Mönchengladbach, Hannover
3+ goal games: 10

Far better known internationally than Burgsmüller thanks largely to his hugely successful coaching career with the likes of Real Madrid and Bayern, Heynckes also sits a place above him among the Bundesliga’s all-time scorers on 220 goals from 369 matches.

The vast majority of those strikes – 195 in 283 league outings – came for Heynckes’ hometown team, Mönchengladbach, where they helped bring four Bundesliga titles in just seven years.

He netted five in the record-equalling 12-0 win over Dortmund in April 1978, which was actually the last time he scored three or more times in a German top-flight match.

Watch: Jupp Heynckes - a legendary goalscorer and coach

“Whatever the score, someone on the bench would point two or three fingers to indicate that we needed to score two or three more goals. And I always said, 'Are you crazy? How many more goals do you need us to score?'” explained Heynckes as the Foals desperately tried to overhaul leaders and Rhine arch-rivals Cologne to win the league title on goal difference on the final day of the season.

They failed to do so as the Billy Goats clung on thanks to a 5-0 win at St Pauli that saw them crowned champions by three goals, but Heynckes still has fond memories of a legendary 90 minutes.

“The 12-0 victory also had a special meaning for me because I ended my career afterward due to injury, and it was obviously a great feeling to end my career with five goals in one game.”

Kane closing in…

The Bayern man has already struck a hat-trick nine times in Germany’s top division. That puts him on a par with Bayern legend and double Ballon d’Or winner Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Cologne icon Dieter Müller, who remains the only player ever to score six goals in a single Bundesliga game, doing so for Cologne in their 7-2 win against Bremen in August 1977.

Kane’s tally also includes what German fans would consider a lupenreiner or “flawless” hat-trick. Not just three goals in the same game, but three in the same half and uninterrupted by another goalscorer, a feat Kane achieved against Stuttgarton Matchday 7 of the 2024/25 season.

Watch: All Kane's Bundesliga hat-tricks

“I always say as a striker, you’re going to have moments where the ball falls to you like it did today, you’re going to have moments where you hit the post of the keeper makes a good save,” explained Kane, who has yet to find the net more than three times in a single league match since his arrival at Bayern in summer 2023.

“The most important thing for me is to stay focused, believe in myself – as the team does – and just try and help the team in every moment.”