Turkey: national football players with most goals scored of all time as of 2024

As of May 2024, Hakan Şükür is the all-time leader in goals scored for the national football team of Turkey with a total of 51 goals scored. Şükür retired from the national team in 2007 after playing in 112 international matches. He is trailing in goals in front of Burak Yılmaz with 31 goals, who is not yet retired from the team, and Tuncay Şanlı with 22 goals, who retired from the national team in 2010.

World Cup history

Turkey did not qualify for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup. Turkey qualified for the World Cup in 1950 in Brazil for the first time but withdrew from it. After that, Turkey played in the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland but did not pass the group stage. Since then, Turkey qualified for the tournament just once in 2002 in South Korea and Japan and came in third place.

Stadium attendance

The match with the highest attendance that Turkey played in 2018 was against Russia on October 14th in Fisht Stadium in Sochi and hosted 38,288 stadium spectators. The match with the highest attendance in history in which Turkey played was back in 1961 against the USSR in Lenin in front of 102,000 attendees. Stadium popularity seems to be rising in the Süper Lig, which is the top tier football league in Turkey, with an average of nine thousand spectators per match in 2019/20, roughly double than the years before.