# Is Shevchenko the Best AC Milan Striker Ever? 14 Lists at 50
> Andriy Shevchenko turned 50 on 29 September 2026. Milan's derby record-holder, Chelsea's record signing and Ukraine's top scorer, on 14 very different lists.
*By YPB Team · Published September 30, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/andriy-shevchenko-ranked-many-ways*
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Andriy Shevchenko in Kyiv, 2016, his first autumn as Ukraine's head coach. Photo: Oleg Dubyna, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Andriy Shevchenko turned 50 on 29 September 2026.1 Few strikers have packed as many different careers into those years. He won five league titles in a row with Dynamo Kyiv, the 2004 Ballon d'Or with AC Milan, and the 2003 Champions League final by scoring Milan's final penalty. Then came Chelsea's record fee, six years as Ukraine's head coach and, since January 2024, the presidency of the Ukrainian Association of Football.5
Each chapter lands him on a different kind of list. Here are 14 of them. They start with Milan's centre-forwards and end with a list about suits.
> In Milan he is a record, in London a cautionary tale, in Kyiv the benchmark: Shevchenko's fourteen lists describe three careers that barely overlap.
## Shevchenko vs van Basten: the best striker in AC Milan history
AC Milan's striker ranking holds eight names, and two of them won the Ballon d'Or while scoring for the club: Marco van Basten three times and Andriy Shevchenko once.
Shevchenko scored 175 goals for Milan across two spells, second only to Gunnar Nordahl in the club's history.1 He was Serie A's top scorer twice, with 24 goals in 1999–2000 and 24 again in 2003–04.
Van Basten's case is concentration. The Dutchman won the European Cup twice with Arrigo Sacchi's side and played his last match at 28, his ankle wrecked by injury.
Filippo Inzaghi is the third serious claim, the poacher who scored both Milan goals in the 2007 Champions League final. Nordahl, the Swede who still holds Milan's scoring record, anchors the list from the 1950s.
Two Ballon d'Or winners in the red and black, fifteen years apart. Play it →
## Paolo Maldini and the best AC Milan player of all time
The all-time AC Milan list is a defenders' list first. Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi wore the club's two retired shirts, and every forward on it has to argue past them.
Shevchenko's claim rests on goals and on the trophy Milan value most. On 28 May 2003 at Old Trafford he took Milan's fifth penalty against Juventus and won the Champions League final 3–2 on penalties, after a 0–0 draw in which Dida saved three kicks.3
Maldini played for Milan for 25 seasons and won five European Cups. Kaká, Ruud Gullit, Gianni Rivera, Clarence Seedorf and Zvonimir Boban fill out a list that also rewards style.
The Ukrainian's weakness here is time. He left for London at 29, and a list built on loyalty weighs a quarter-century against seven years.
The club's longest career against its sharpest seven years. Play it →
## Milan derby: Shevchenko vs Zanetti, 14 goals against 45 derbies
Milan and Inter have played 246 official derbies, all of them in a stadium the two clubs share.4 No player has scored more in the fixture than Shevchenko, whose 14 derby goals all came in Milan colours.
Javier Zanetti is the Inter answer. The Argentine captain played 45 derbies, a total only Maldini, with 53, has beaten.4
The list crosses the city in both directions. Zlatan Ibrahimović, Ronaldo, Andrea Pirlo, Clarence Seedorf and Hernán Crespo all played for both clubs. So did Giuseppe Meazza, the Inter icon whose name the stadium carries.
A scorer's record against a captain's presence is a real choice, and Olivier Giroud's winning double in 2022 shows how one afternoon can put a name on this list.
The fixture's top scorer against Inter's longest-serving captain. Play it →
## Roberto Baggio vs Shevchenko: the best striker in Serie A history
Serie A's striker ranking reaches back to Meazza and Silvio Piola in the 1930s and forward to Ciro Immobile. Shevchenko joined Milan from Dynamo Kyiv in 1999 for a reported $25 million and won the scoring title in his first Italian season.1
His Serie A total for Milan's first spell was 127 goals in 208 games, a rate close to a goal every other match.
Roberto Baggio brings a different kind of case. He won the 1993 Ballon d'Or at Juventus and played for Fiorentina, both Milan clubs and Bologna, carrying the idea of the Italian No. 10 through the 1990s.
Gabriel Batistuta, Christian Vieri and Luca Toni are here too, and Piola still holds the league's scoring record, so this is the list where Shevchenko has the most company from his own trade.
A century of Italian strikers, and a Ukrainian who topped the scoring chart in year one. Play it →
## Ballon d'Or 2004: Kaká, Shevchenko and the award before Messi
The 21st-century Ballon d'Or ranking holds all 13 men who have won the award since 2000, which makes it a list with two giants and eleven other people. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo won the award between them for most of the years from 2008.
Shevchenko won it in 2004, the season Milan took the Scudetto. Two Dynamo Kyiv players had taken it before him, Blokhin a year before Shevchenko was born and Belanov a decade later, so he was the third winner raised in Ukrainian football.
Kaká won it three years later at the same club. The Brazilian was the last winner before the Messi and Ronaldo years began.
Luka Modrić, Karim Benzema and Rodri are the other names that broke that run, and each of them won later, against a stronger field, which is the counter-argument to any 2000s winner.
Milan's two Ballon d'Or winners of the 2000s, three years apart. Play it →
## Gerd Müller and the best European striker of all time
Europe's striker list is short, ten names, and it starts with Gerd Müller, who scored 68 goals in 62 games for West Germany. Van Basten, Thierry Henry, Robert Lewandowski, Eusébio and Alan Shearer complete most of it.
Shevchenko's international record is 48 goals in 111 games for Ukraine, still the national record.1 The rate is well below Müller's, and the context is different.
He played for a country that had never reached a World Cup until 2006. That summer he captained Ukraine to the quarter-finals in their first tournament.
Der Bomber's scoring rate against a striker who carried a new national team. Play it →
## Thierry Henry vs Shevchenko: the top strikers of the 2000s
A decade ranking is a fair test of Shevchenko, because the 2000s held both halves of his career. From 2000 to 2006 he ranked among Europe's most feared forwards. From 2006 to 2009 he was at Chelsea.
Thierry Henry owns the decade in England. He won four Premier League Golden Boots and became Arsenal's record scorer.
Ronaldo scored eight goals to win the 2002 World Cup, Samuel Eto'o won two Champions Leagues with Barcelona, and Didier Drogba became the Chelsea striker Shevchenko was bought to play alongside. The list has 20 names, including Raúl, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Miroslav Klose.
Milan's No. 7 against Arsenal's No. 14, the two faces of the decade's European football. Play it →
## Andrea Pirlo and the players Carlo Ancelotti coached
Carlo Ancelotti coached Milan from 2001 to 2009 and later won the Champions League with Real Madrid. The ranking of players he managed includes Cristiano Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, Luka Modrić and Toni Kroos.
Shevchenko was the striker of Ancelotti's first great Milan side, the one that won in Manchester in 2003 and the Scudetto a year later.
Andrea Pirlo was the other half of that team. Ancelotti made the former No. 10 the deep-lying playmaker of that team, and the role defined his career.
In a list this crowded, the Milan players compete with Ancelotti's Madrid stars, and Ronaldo and Zidane arrive with World Cups or Ballon d'Ors of their own.
Two pillars of the 2003 Milan side, now competing with Ancelotti's Madrid. Play it →
## Chelsea, 2006: Shevchenko vs Fernando Torres on the Premier League flops list
On 31 May 2006 Chelsea signed Shevchenko on a four-year contract for a club-record fee that UEFA put at around €45 million.2 The deal closed after several failed attempts.
The return was nine league goals in 48 games.1 He won the FA Cup and the League Cup in 2007, and never looked like the Milan striker again.
Fernando Torres is the obvious comparison: another expensive striker bought by Chelsea at the height of his fame, in 2011, who also struggled to score at Stamford Bridge.
Antony, Nicolas Pépé, Jadon Sancho and Harry Maguire bring the list up to date, and the Shevchenko deal reads as a warning few clubs heeded.
Chelsea's two record-breaking strikers of the Abramovich years. Play it →
## Gonzalo Higuaín and the most overrated strikers in football
An overrated list only takes players who were once rated very highly, so Shevchenko's place on it is a backhanded compliment. The case against him is made of the years after 2006.
Milan took him back on loan for 2008–09, and he played 18 league games without a goal.1
Gonzalo Higuaín knows the same arc. He broke the Serie A scoring record with Napoli in 2016, then had a short, unhappy loan at Milan. Harry Kane and Karim Benzema also appear, a sign of how far the word "overrated" can stretch.
Two strikers whose Milan loans went badly. Play it →
## Blokhin vs Shevchenko: the greatest Ukrainian footballer
Ukraine's all-time list starts with two Ballon d'Or winners from the same Kyiv club. Oleh Blokhin won in 1975 as the winger of the Dynamo side that took the Cup Winners' Cup and beat Bayern Munich in the Super Cup.
Shevchenko won in 2004 and captained the national team to its first World Cup. His coach at that 2006 tournament was Blokhin himself.
The rest of the list covers every era of Ukrainian football. Anatoliy Tymoshchuk won the Champions League with Bayern, Oleksandr Zinchenko won the Premier League with Manchester City, and Mykhailo Mudryk became the country's most expensive player when he joined Chelsea in 2023.
Ukraine's two Ballon d'Or winners, and a player-coach pairing from 2006. Play it →
## Dynamo Kyiv: Rebrov, Shevchenko and the Lobanovskyi years
Shevchenko's first club is where his lists begin. Dynamo Kyiv won five straight Ukrainian titles in his first spell, 1994 to 1999, under Valeriy Lobanovskyi.1
Serhiy Rebrov was his partner up front. The two scored the goals of the 1998–99 run to the Champions League semi-finals, and Rebrov later coached Ukraine as well.
Lobanovskyi appears here as a player: he was a Dynamo winger in the early 1960s. After the 2003 final, Shevchenko took his Champions League medal to Lobanovskyi's grave in Kyiv.
He came back to Dynamo in 2009 and scored 23 league goals in 55 games before retiring in 2012.
The strike partnership of Dynamo's 1999 Champions League run. Play it →
## Franz Beckenbauer and the players who managed their country
Franz Beckenbauer won the World Cup as West Germany's captain in 1974 and as their coach in 1990. Didier Deschamps repeated the double with France in 1998 and 2018, and Mário Zagallo did it for Brazil.
Shevchenko coached Ukraine from 2016 to 2021: 52 matches, 25 wins and a quarter-final at Euro 2020, the country's best result at a European Championship.1
Club management was harder. At Genoa he won one of his 11 matches and was sacked in January 2022.
His coaching record shares this list with Diego Maradona's 2010 World Cup, Gareth Southgate's two European finals and Roberto Mancini's Euro 2020 title.
A World Cup winner in boots and suit, and a Euro 2020 quarter-finalist. Play it →
## David Beckham and the most stylish footballers
Shevchenko is a close friend of Giorgio Armani and has modelled for the designer.1
The obvious names are all here: David Beckham, George Best and Paolo Maldini, plus Andrea Pirlo, Thierry Henry and Paul Pogba.
Beckham's haircuts against Shevchenko's Armani suits. Play it →
## Fifty years, three cities
Shevchenko's lists split by city. Milan's lists put him beside van Basten and Nordahl, London's put him beside Torres, and Kyiv's put him beside Blokhin and Lobanovskyi. Few players have a single career that reads so differently depending on where the question is asked.
Each of these rankings is decided by a series of two-way picks, and the explainer on [how pairwise comparison builds an order](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison) shows why that suits a player like him. If your Milan, Chelsea or Ukraine list starts with someone else, make it and see who it puts first.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Greatest Number 10 Ever? Francesco Totti at 50, on 16 Lists](/articles/totti-at-50-rankings) — Serie A's other fiftieth birthday, one club for 25 years
- [What Is Ukraine Famous For? Borscht, Bubka and Carol of the Bells on 15 Lists](/articles/ukraine-ranked-many-ways) — the country behind Shevchenko, from boxing to Eurovision
- [Where Does Álvaro Morata Rank Among Spain's Strikers? 13 Lists](/articles/alvaro-morata-ranked-many-ways) — another Chelsea striker who never settled in London
Sources
Wikipedia — Andriy Shevchenko: born 29 September 1976; five league titles with Dynamo Kyiv 1994–99; $25 million move to Milan in 1999; 127 Serie A goals in 208 games and 175 Milan goals in all, second in the club's history; Serie A top scorer 1999–2000 and 2003–04; 9 league goals in 48 games for Chelsea; 18 league games without a goal on loan at Milan 2008–09; 23 goals in 55 league games in his second Dynamo spell; 48 goals in 111 games for Ukraine; Ukraine manager 2016–21 (52 matches, 25 wins, Euro 2020 quarter-final); Genoa 2021–22 (1 win in 11); friendship with Giorgio Armani: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-30)
UEFA.com — Shevchenko seals Chelsea switch: four-year contract, club-record fee of around €45 million, 31 May 2006: uefa.com (checked 2026-09-30)
Wikipedia — 2003 UEFA Champions League final: Old Trafford, 28 May 2003, 0–0 after extra time, Milan won 3–2 on penalties, Shevchenko scored the decisive kick: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-30)
Wikipedia — Derby della Madonnina: 246 official derbies; Shevchenko the all-time top scorer with 14 goals; Maldini 53 and Zanetti 45 appearances: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-30)
Ukrinform — Shevchenko elected president of the Ukrainian Association of Football on 25 January 2024, 93 of 94 delegates in favour: ukrinform.net (checked 2026-09-30)
