As mentioned above the biggest margin of victory soccer was in the Madagascan Champions League (the top division in Madagascar) in 2002 which was 149-0 and was played between two of Madagascar’s top teams. All 149 goals were own goals scored by the losing team. The reason for the scoreline was that the losing team were protesting a couple of bad refereeing decisions early in the game; the winning side were bystanders in the game as every time the game restarted the losing team knocked the ball back down the field to their own net.
After that win the next biggest wins occur at levels generally considered too low for record purposes or in women’s soccer which is usually considered to have its own separate records
Ignoring the 149-0 game the biggest win at senior level was 36-0 in the Scottish Cup of 1885, as also mentioned above. The circumstances being a decent regional team was drawn against a cricket team mistakenly invited to take part in the cup. According to reports the some members of the losing side had never played soccer before. Coincidentally the next biggest win after that (35-0) also occurred in the Scottish Cup on the same day! None of the clubs involved in either match would’ve been professional (partly because professionalism was illegal in Scottish football at the time), but as the win occurred in the Scottish Cup it is considered “1st class” or “senior” level.
There have been some similarly-sized wins in recent times in lower-division Eastern European football, but this was the result of match-fixing by teams needing to make up goal differentials.
Other notable large wins include:
Australia 31-0 American Samoa 2001 World Cup qualifying match- largest international football win.
Here’s a video of a side that had to win by 10 goals to win promotion. After 80 minutes, the score was 2-0. After 90 minutes, the score was 11-0.
The opposition don’t even attempt to be subtle. The funniest thing is each time the winning team score, they celebrate as if they just scored a brilliant team goal - rather than just walking the ball down the pitch without falling over.
Mind you, at the end, they show the goals from the team that got knocked out by the fix - their game doesn’t look like it’s played at a very high ‘intensity’ either. There were 3 penalties in the last 5 minutes of their game - a feeble effort at cheating.
The funniest thing about seeing that race live is that Secretariat did not even look like he was really running. It was like he was going on a leisurely stroll. The house was barely working out at all.
Of course, one of those cannon fodder horses, Sham, was one of the fastest horses of the Twentieth Century–one of the very very few to have run a two-minute Kentucky Derby. He just had the misfortune to be born the same year as Secretariat.
It’s also worth mentioning that the pitch for that match was designed to be a batting paradise the likes of which had never been seen. Supposedly, the grass of the pitch had been rolled so hard that you could see your reflection when you were standing on it, although that’s obviously an exaggeration.
There was some speculation in the media before the game that if Australia won the toss and batted first on that wicket then Bradman, Barnes and McCabe were capable of piling on a score of 2000+.
Cricket journalists in the mid-1950s even joked that if Australia had won that toss in 1938 Australia “might still be batting”.
Thanks for posting this. You’d think that I’d recall this one specifically, since I follow baseball, the 22-0 score has been burned into my brain, and the Yankees are ESPN’s home team (well, the Red Sox, too). So you think I’d have remembered this.
Well, at least Pirates-Cubs are still the NL record. Unless someone else has a surprise for me…
Super Bowl XXIV: 49ers 55 - Broncos 10, after the 1989 season. The most lopsided Super Bowl to date, and the 55 points by the 49ers is still the most scored by a Super Bowl team.
Thanks in part to Leon Lett’s blunder in Super Bowl XXVII.
I watched it live on TV, too. It was amazing and, as a young kid watching my first Derby, Preakness and Belmont as Secretariat ended a 25-year drought on the Triple Crown, the way Secretariat won the Belmont was magical.
Of course, we haven’t had a Triple Crown winner since Affirmed and Steve Cauthen in 1978, so it’s now 35 years and counting…
A couple of rugby league games that I recall. They aren’t record scores but are interesting for other reasons.
St Marys (a Sydney suburb) once lost 102-1 in an A Grade game. A field goal is worth 1 point and is usually only kicked to break a deadlock late in a game. The St Marys field goal was kicked when they trailed 102-0. Genius!
In a high school game at a knockout carnival Patrician Brother’s kicked off, the opposition lost the ball and Patrician Brother’s got possession and scored. The team that didn’t score kicks off in rugby. For the rest of the game Patrician Brothers scored on every possession. Their opponents only touched the ball once in the game, apart from carrying it back to kickoff, and that was the fumble from the kickoff.
pffft all pale into insignificance, I coach the Under 12 Aussie Heat local basketball team and we won our last game 103 to 4. This was after we played the second half with 3 players on the court.
I hated every second of it, we turned into 3 point practice.
I played a game like that (I may have been a year or two older though). The other team showed up with 6 kids, but one of them had an artificial leg from mid thigh (downward). However, that kid was clearly the star of the team despite the fact that his artificial limb was at least 1 inch too long. He squeaked and clomped around the court. We were up 40-0 at halftime and it just wasn’t even fun. The coaches conferred at half time and they were from a small town nearby and incredibly resilient and proud- they didn’t want any of our guys, and they had a goal to just score against us and to get a couple of steals and rebounds (our coach didn’t tell us until after the game) but they didn’t want us to go easy on them. “No freebies”. The scoreboard stopped tracking our points and they ended up getting 1 point (on 1 for 10 shooting from the line). The whole gym was cheering for them, and everyone was in good spirits after the game.
It really makes the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality seem silly IMHO. Kids aren’t stupid.
In 1973 I was a young and impressionable 12-year old kid when tennis retiree and then-55 year old Bobby Riggs challenged Billie Jean King to a “Battle of the Sexes” match (Wikipedia, here).
Billie Jean King smoked him, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. And from what I recall from watching the match on TV, it wasn’t even as close as the score might indicate.
either. There were 3 penalties in the last 5 minutes of their game - a feeble effort at cheating.