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One hundred eighty-five.
That number (or whatever it ends up being, depending how many more she scores) will be the one that defines Christine Sinclair’s career with the Canadian women’s team. Now that she’s scored more international goals than any soccer player ever, male or female, she’ll be an unshakable part of football history forever.
That’s not the only impressive number from Sinclair’s 20-year international career, though. Plenty of facts and figures help paint the picture of Canada’s greatest ever player.
For instance: She’s Canada’s all-time leading scorer by a 112-goal margin. No active women’s footballer has more caps than her.
With that in mind, let’s delve into a few more of the numbers behind Sinclair’s rise to superstardom.
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290 – That’s how many caps Sinclair has earned with the women’s team. It’s the most for Canada by a long shot (trumping Diana Matheson’s 203), and it’s third all-time globally (retired American star Kristine Lilly leads all footballers with 352 international appearances). Sinclair’s senior career began at the 2000 Algarve Cup, when she was 16 years old, with five FIFA Women’s World Cups and three Olympics on her resume.
40 – Sinclair’s goals have come against 40 different countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe (and almost everywhere in between). That’s seven more than Abby Wambach, whose record Sinclair just broke. Indeed, it’s also four more conquered opponents than Ali Daei, the Iranian who is the all-time international scorer on the men’s side, with 109 goals. Cristiano Ronaldo has Sinclair beat, though; the Portugal star has scored against 41 different opponents.
5 – The Canadian star is only the second player to score in five FIFA Women’s World Cups, behind Brazil forward Marta. She began the streak at the 2003 tournament in the U.S., and she most recently scored for Canada in a group stage match against the Netherlands at last summer’s World Cup in France. Sinclair has 10 goals to her name at the World Cup, more than any other Canadian, and in a four-way tie for fifth all-time.
7 – Sinclair has made the shortlist for FIFA’s Women’s World Player of the Year seven times, including four in a row from 2005 to 2008. She’s never quite won the award, often coming up short against the aforementioned Marta, but she’s earned accolades at home; Sinclair has a whopping 14 Canada Soccer women’s player of the year nods.
98 – That’s how many minutes it took for Sinclair to score her first goal for the senior women’s national team. She was held off the scoresheet as a 16-year-old in her debut, in Canada’s 4-0 loss to China at the 2000 Algarve Cup. But it took her just eight minutes of her second match — a 2-1 defeat to Norway two days later — to find the net and give Canada an early lead. Sinclair scored three goals at the tournament, with a brace in Canada’s fifth-place match against Denmark. She has a bit of a penchant for scoring early, too: She scored four minutes into the 2003 Women’s World Cup against Germany for her introduction to that tournament.