Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé have done something no pair of teammates has managed since FIFA started counting assists sixty years ago. The French forwards combined for six goals and assists at the 2026 World Cup, breaking a record that previously belonged to some of the sport’s most decorated duos.

The old benchmark was five, shared by Poland’s Andrzej Szarmach and Grzegorz Lato and by Germany’s Miroslav Klose and Michael Ballack.

How the goals piled up

The Mbappé-Dembélé connection produced across matches against Australia, Poland, Iraq, Norway, and Sweden, a stretch of games where at least one of the two seemed to be involved in every dangerous French attack.

Dembélé scored a hat-trick during the tournament, becoming only the third French player in World Cup history to accomplish that feat. The first was Just Fontaine, who scored 13 goals in the 1958 tournament. The second was Mbappé himself.

Mbappé closing in on Messi’s all-time record

Mbappé has now scored 18 career World Cup goals. That puts him exactly one behind Lionel Messi’s all-time record of 19.

Mbappé burst onto the World Cup scene in 2018 as a teenager, scoring four goals as France lifted the trophy in Russia. He followed that up in Qatar in 2022, where his hat-trick in the final against Argentina became one of the most replayed sequences in the sport’s history. France lost that final on penalties.

What makes this record particularly notable is the “since 1966” qualifier. That’s when FIFA began officially tracking assists, meaning this is effectively the record across the entire modern era of the sport.