10 Fastest Hat-Tricks in World Football Since the Millennium (2024)

It is 11 years to the day since one of English football’s less heralded feats.

On February 24, 2004, the Bournemouth forward James Hayter came on as a late substitute in a Division Two (now League One) match against Wrexham at Dean Court—and promptly scored three goals inside 140 seconds.

It broke a 61-year-old record for the fastest hat-trick in English football history, and it’s got us thinking about similarly impressive trebles since the turn of the millennium.

Including a bit more information on Hayter’s feat, here are 10 of the fastest hat-tricks we’ve ever seen.

Don’t take your eyes off them.

Time: 2 minutes 20 seconds

It was one of the most remarkable feats in English football history, but the parents of the man who achieved it didn’t see it.

With their son James still on Bournemouth’s bench in the closing minutes of a match against Wrexham in February 2004, Mary and Richard Hayter decided to leave Dean Court in order to catch an earlier ferry back home to the Isle of Wight.

They then had to listen to their son score three goals on the car radio, breaking a 61-year-old English league football record set by Blackpool’s Ephraim Dodds (Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler still has the top-flight record, set in four minutes 33 seconds against Arsenal in 1994) and completing a stunning week for Hayter, who had become the father to a son just days before.

(Background: BBC)

Time: 7 minutes

These days at Swansea City, the French forward Bafetimbi Gomis holds a piece of Champions League history that it is going to be extremely tough to take off him.

Against Dinamo Zagreb in 2011, Gomis scored the tournament’s fastest-ever hat-trick inside seven minutes as his side hammered the Croatian outfit 7-1, with the forward breaking a record which had been previously set by the Blackburn Rovers striker Mike Newell in 1995.

Time: 7 minutes

There wasn’t too much that was remarkable about the first half of Tottenham’s Premier League meeting with Wigan at White Hart Lane in November 2009, with Peter Crouch’s goal separating the sides at the break.

Chaos then took over in the second period, though, and Jermain Defoe fired in three goals in the space of seven minutes—with Wigan’s Paul Scharner scoring in between—before going on to score twice more in a remarkable 9-1 win for the hosts, their biggest-ever in the top flight.

Time: 6 minutes

Brazilians have long held a strong relationship with the Russian Premier League, a place where many of them thrive even if they are doing so away from the limelight.

The forward Welliton was an icon at Spartak Moscow during his seven years there, and just a week after notching another treble in August 2010, he popped up with a hat-trick inside six minutes in a match against Tom Tomsk.

Time: 5 minutes

The fastest treble in Ligue 1 history will soon be celebrating its 10th anniversary, and it was only the beginning of the pain for FC Istres on that afternoon in April 2005.

As reported by UEFA.com, Lille bounced back from an eight-match winless run to hammer their stunned opponents 8-0, with the former France under-21 and current Congo forward Matt Moussilou setting the tone with three strikes in between 13 and 18 minutes, with five more Lille goals to follow.

As also revealed by UEFA, Moussilou broke a record which had only stood for a few months—with Sochaux’s Jeremy Menez hitting three in seven minutes against Bordeaux in January 2005.

Time: 5 minutes

Mateja Kezman might have flopped at Chelsea, but the Serbian was pretty impressive wherever else he went and was in lethal form for Fenerbache in a Turkish Cup match at lower-league Alanyaspor in 2008.

Fener hammered their hapless opponents 10-3 on their own ground, with Kezman scoring three times in five minutes to take the score from 6-3 to 9-3, before Colin Kazim-Richards somewhat steals the show with a stunning strike for number 10.

Time: 4 minutes

Iago Aspas was a figure of fun as he took his place on the fringes of the Liverpool side which nearly won the Premier League in 2013/14, but his loan move to Sevilla during this campaign has gone somewhat better.

As detailed by ESPN, Aspas—who has only scored once for Liverpool—struck three times in four minutes as Sevilla beat lower league side Sabadell 5-1 in the Copa Del Rey in December, a feat which betters Robbie Fowler’s famous Liverpool treble 20 years earlier.

The second is probably the pick of them, but Reds fans might scarcely believe what they are seeing.

Time: Under 3 minutes

As a way to announce yourself in senior football, a hat-trick in under three minutes is a pretty decent way to do it.

Seventeen-year-old Joel Pohjanpalo did just that in HJK Helsinki’s first match of the 2012 Finnish League season, putting IFK Mariehamn to the sword in under three minutes, during which he turned a 1-0 deficit into a 3-1 lead.

Pohjanpalo’s feat brought him to the attention of many, and later in 2012 he made his senior Finnish debut before a short move to the Bundesliga with Bayer Leverkusen.

Time: 1 minute 57 seconds

Coming in at a time just under Hayter’s feat is the fastest-ever World Cup hat-trick—a treble scored by Egypt’s Abdul Hamid Bassiouny against Namibia in a qualifier for the 2002 event in Japan and South Korea.

FIFA acclaim the feat in their list of impressive hat-tricks here, with Bassiouny’s 117-second treble in the 8-2 win being the only three goals he ever managed for his country.

Not a bad impact.

Time: 70 seconds

One man who has everyone on this list beaten, though, is the Sheffield Sunday League footballer Alex Torr, who fired in an astonishing 70-second hat-trick in a match in 2013.

Torr scored four goals as his side won 7-1, with his first three coming in an astonishing spell in between the 11th and 13th minutes when the defence simply couldn't handle him.

The Daily Mirror has more on the 20-year-old's feat which everyone on this list can only stand and applaud.