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.
