World Cup hat-tricks: and the only one scored in a final
Only one player has scored three goals in a World Cup final. Around that feat lie records as rare as five goals in a single match.
Scoring three goals in a match is a feat in any competition. Doing it at a World Cup, in front of the whole planet, places a footballer in a very select club. And one of its members stands alone at the top.
That man is Geoff Hurst. In the 1966 final at Wembley, the Englishman scored all three goals in a 4-2 win over West Germany that gave England their only world title. He remains, six decades on, the only player to have netted a hat-trick in a final. Whether one of his goals —the one that made it 3-2 in extra time— fully crossed the line is still debated today; the «ghost goal» is part of the myth.
The tournament's first hat-trick came much earlier, at the 1930 debut, and took decades to be officially credited to the American Bert Patenaude, against Paraguay. FIFA did not recognise it until 2006.
Some records border on the absurd for their speed. In 1982, Hungary's László Kiss came on as a substitute against El Salvador and scored three goals in barely seven minutes: the fastest hat-trick ever seen at a World Cup, and the only one by a player who started on the bench.
Repetition has its owner too. Gabriel Batistuta is the only player to have scored hat-tricks at two different World Cups, in 1994 and 1998. And above any hat-trick stands the madness of Oleg Salenko, who in 1994 put five goals past Cameroon in a single match, a ceiling that looks impossible to match.
The hat-trick is, in short, a striker's perfect afternoon. At a World Cup, moreover, it is the kind of feat that turns a name into a legend in one sitting.
Source: Wikipedia (Geoff Hurst; Bert Patenaude; László Kiss; Gabriel Batistuta; Oleg Salenko).