2022 World Cup Top Goalscorer Odds: Can Ballon d'Or winner Karim Benzema prove why is the best at the World Cup
Karim Benzema is the man on everyone’s mind at the moment, finally receiving the most prestigious individual award in football, the Ballon d’Or. Today at BettingOdds.com we’ve taken a deeper dive into the Frenchman’s stats and have analysed his World Cup Top Scorer Odds, where he is one of the current favourites in the betting.
We all saw it coming, this man recently has proved himself as one of the best strikers of all time and last season no one could match what he was doing.
Last campaign Benzema managed to secure the Champions League, La Liga, and the not-so-elusive Spanish Supercup. On top of all of this in 46 games for Real Madrid he scored 44 times and assisted 15 goals averaging out at a goal involvement every 66 minutes for the whole season, that is absolutely bonkers. To put this into perspective, Messi was involved in 26 goals last year, and Ronaldo was involved in 27, combining the two of them, they’re still four behind the French international. He also finished nine goals clear of anyone in the La Liga Golden Boot race.
To put into perspective how good he was, here’s a list of the best players when it came to goal contributions last season;
- Karim Benzema: 59
- Robert Lewandowski: 57
- Mo Salah: 47
- Erling Haaland: 37
- Ciro Immobile: 36
When it comes to the Champions League, players rarely have a better campaign than Karim Benzema did last season. In 12 games he scored 15 goals and assisted twice, a tally that has only ever been bested by Cristiano Ronaldo. These goals were not against just any opposition either, he scored against the likes of Manchester City, PSG, and Chelsea. In fact, he scored more goals than teams like Manchester United and Barcelona combined.
Benzema has really come into his own since Ronaldo left Real Madrid. In 2017/18 where Benzema was still playing next to Ronaldo, he only managed to score five goals. When the Portuguese superstar left, the next season Benzema scored 21 league goals, after that he scored 21 again, in 2020/2021 he bagged 23, and then last season he scored 27. It’s clear that Real Madrid was not utilising the talent that Benzema had and since he has become Real Madrid’s main man, he has also seen a return to the French national team.
The return of Karim to the French national squad was a welcome one by all the fans in his first major tournament back, he showed France exactly what he can do by scoring four goals in four games for them at Euro 2020, unfortunately for France, he ultimately wasn’t enough to get them past the round of 16 where they lost to Switzerland on penalties, a game in which Benzema actually scored a brace.
France, the current reigning World Cup champions, will arrive as the second favourites for World Cup 2022 and with the quality they’ve got in the side, they’re a hard team to back against. Unfortunately for Benzema, he faces a similar task to his old Madrid days where he will not be their main man, instead Kylian Mbappe will be playing the role of Golden Boy. These days, Mbappe is proving to be everything that is wrong with modern-day prima donna superstars. The youngster simply has to be the main man or he is going to throw his toys out of the pram, at PSG he has a say in the club's transfers and is on penalty duty no matter the state of the game.
Anyway, back to Benzema, how will the Ballon d’Or winner fare at the World Cup? Well, he currently stands as the third favourite to win the Golden Boot just behind his teammate Kylian Mbappe and the favourite Harry Kane. It doesn’t look likely that Benzema will be taking any of the spot kicks for France with Mbappe in the squad and that might make it fairly hard for him to compete for the Golden Boot award with the likes of Harry Kane on penalty duty for their country. Benzema definitely has the quality to carry France to another World Cup. France are the bookmaker's second favourite to win the trophy and who knows, a World Cup to his name could even start another potential Ballon d’Or run for the striker.
The motivation for Benzema in the French squad has never been higher, he can prove to the world that he can do it on the international stage yet again after his absence from the French national team, and he can outshine Mbappe as the best player in the squad. On top of this, a good campaign on the scoring front can see him climb France’s all-time top scorer rankings of where he is currently the 5th highest top scorer with 37 goals. Just ahead of him is Platini who is on 41 and then Griezmann at 42, so just a few goals for Benzema at the World Cup and he could see himself as the third most prolific French player in history, I can’t think of many more motivating accolades to go for. If Benzema has a good World Cup campaign, it should go without saying, so will France, he is playing too key a role at Madrid to not influence this French squad.
