This is my record of all goalscorers in World Cup history, including both qualifying and finals goals, from 1930 to the games played in September 2016 for qualifying for Russia 2018. In total, in comes to 22366 goals scored by 8736 players.
In the first sheet, the players are ranked in terms of total goals across all tournaments and qualifying campaigns. If the number is in gold, it means that the player was the top goalscorer in that tournament or qualifying campaign. Silver represents the 2nd highest goalscorer, and bronze the 3rd highest. Blue means the player was in the top 10 goalscorers in that tournament, or qualifying session.
The second and third sheets split the data up into qualifying only and finals only, respectively.
'Countries - Overview' shows the all time top goalscorers, top qualifying goalscorers, and top finals goalscorer for each country. 'Countries - Detailed' shows all the goalscorers sorted by country.
The sheet titled 'Participation' shows the competition that each nation participated in. I have included another sheet called 'Country Changes' that shows countries that change name or form. Some countries have changed names (ex. Zaire to Congo), whereas some countries have formed from or succeeded other countries. In these cases, the FIFA rules for succession have been followed, and these are shown in this sheet (ex. Russia assuming Soviet Union's record)
Data for this was an absolute nightmare to source. I used allworldcup.narod.ru and RSSSF for the pre-1990 World Cups. For 1994 onwards, I usually relied on Wikipedia. However, I still checked each game one at a time, as the goalscorer totals on many pages were incorrect. Many of the early qualifying matches have differing goalscorers depending on the sources, and I was forced to use my best judgement. As there was so much scope for error, I really cannot guarantee the 100% accuracy of everything in this spreadsheet. Nevertheless, I really tried my hardest to make all the data as correct as possible.
All the data in this spreadsheet took me about 11 months on and off to put together. Although I will be updating my personal copy which is more basic, I won't be updating this one as 2018 Qualifying progresses. I will try to upload another version once qualifying is actually complete though.
Some general notes:
When naming players, I have tried to use the spelling as given on Wikipedia in the majority of cases. There were many players for which it was really difficult to determine which of their names was actually the surname. I don't know the intricacies of naming systems for all the countries in the world, so I just used my best judgement.
Bizarrely, Northern Ireland once competed under the name 'Ireland', with the now-Republic of Ireland competing under 'Irish Free State'. Israel also once competed as 'Mandatory Palestine' in the 1930s.
I completed this project the same week that the same at the top of the table changed for the first time in 10 years, from Ali Daei to Carlos Ruiz.
The deepest down the rabbit hole I managed to find myself on this project was finding myself translating match reports from Dutch Guiana in 1965 to try and decipher who scored in those games. I'm going to hazard a guess that I may be the first person to ever complete this full list just because of how stupidly difficult to find some of the information was. Despite my best efforts, around 20 of the goals have been listed as unknown goalscorers because I just couldn't find any record of those games other than the final score.
Thank you, and I hope you all enjoy!
For anyone interested, I also have an equivalent spreadsheet for the Euros.