There was an interesting discussion on the Football Cliches Podcast that 9 Kane, 10 Bellingham, and 11 Rashford all scored in England's 4-2 win over Croatia. They speculated whether a back 4 had ever combined to score in the same match. I realised that wouldn't be too hard to work out.

It turns out the answer is the 1974 World Cup match of Yugoslavia vs Zaire:

  • #5 Josip Katalinski — 22'
  • #6 Vladislav Bogicevic — 35'
  • #7 Ilija Petkovic — 65'

That match was a 9-0 win with 7 goal scorers, so it's unsurprising that it happened to have a useful sequence in it. In fact it had shirt numbers 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 all score in the same match!

However looking further into the match there's quite a dark story behind it. Zaire were the first Sub-Saharan African team to take part in the World Cup (Egypt in 1934 and Morocco in 1970 before them). Racism had kept Black teams out of the World Cup until then. They lost their previous match to Scotland 2-0, despite playing well with an exciting style.

Then they discovered that they weren't going to get paid, because government officials and hangers-on had helped themselves to the generous amounts of money that were to be used for their wages and bonuses. They threatened to go on strike, but FIFA stepped in to give them an allowance each. Zaire reluctantly played the match, but were 3-0 down after 20 minutes, when their Yugoslavian(!!) coach substituted their goalkeeper for a much shorter keeper, who let a goal in a minute later.

They were humiliated in this match, and in the next against Brazil. They were told by the President of Zaire that they couldn't come home if they lost 4-0 against Brazil. They were 2-0 down and Brazil had a free kick within range. A Zaire player panicked and kicked the ball away to try and waste time and disrupt the Brazilians. Obviously the public hadn't been told any of the mitigating circumstances around the situation and people assumed (fairly racistly) that it was a lack of knowledge about the rules of the game (as if someone in a World Cup match wouldn't know about free kicks!).

(I also discovered that before 1954 shirt numbers were banned by FIFA, so there isn't really a way of working it out for the matches before that date)