Biggest Premier League Wins: Every 9-0 and the Records
The biggest Premier League wins are four 9-0 results. Each one explained, with England's record away win, highest-scoring game and older league records.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Records & History23 min read
- Record margin
- 9 goals
- Times it has happened
- 4
- Highest-scoring match
- 7-4, eleven goals
- Football League record
- 13-0
No Premier League team has ever scored ten. In thirty-four seasons and more than thirteen thousand matches in England's top division since 1992, the ceiling has been nine, and the widest winning margin is 9-0. It has been reached four times.
Manchester United beat Ipswich Town 9-0 at Old Trafford on 4 March 1995. Leicester City won 9-0 away to Southampton on 25 October 2019, which is also the biggest away win. Manchester United did it again, against Southampton, on 2 February 2021, and Liverpool beat Bournemouth 9-0 at Anfield on 27 August 2022. The highest-scoring match is a different game altogether, Portsmouth 7-4 Reading in 2007, and the older Football League records run to 12-0 and 13-0. All of these stood at the end of the 2025-26 season.
The biggest win in Premier League history, shared four ways
For twenty-four years the record belonged to one afternoon. Then it was matched three times in thirty-four months.
| Date | Result | Venue | Half-time | Sendings-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 March 1995 | Manchester United 9-0 Ipswich Town | Old Trafford | 3-0 | None |
| 25 October 2019 | Southampton 0-9 Leicester City | St Mary's | 0-5 | Southampton, 12th minute |
| 2 February 2021 | Manchester United 9-0 Southampton | Old Trafford | 4-0 | Southampton, 2nd and 86th minutes |
| 27 August 2022 | Liverpool 9-0 Bournemouth | Anfield | 5-0 | None |
The 1995 match was built around one player. Andy Cole had joined United from Newcastle that January and scored five, the first time anyone had done so in the competition. Mark Hughes got two, Roy Keane opened the scoring and Paul Ince added the other. Ipswich had beaten United 3-2 at Portman Road earlier that season. They finished bottom.
The clustering of the other three needs some explanation, and for one of them part of it is the pandemic. United's 2021 win was played in an empty stadium during a season of compressed fixtures, against a Southampton side missing several senior players through injury. But two of the three also involved the same losing manager, Ralph Hasenhüttl, whose teams pressed high and defended a long way from their own goal. That is a style that wins matches it should not and occasionally loses them by a distance.
- 9Record winning margin, in goals
- 4Times a team has won by nine
- 5Times a team has scored nine
- 11Most goals in one match
Records in Premier League matches from 1992-93 to the end of 2025-26. Nine goals by one team includes Tottenham's 9-1 win over Wigan as well as the four 9-0 results.
Liverpool's was the purest. No red card, no depleted opposition, no empty ground. Bournemouth had been promoted that summer and were eleven against eleven for ninety minutes. Liverpool had failed to win any of their first three league games and were two up inside six minutes of the fourth.
One fact about the four is easy to miss. Manchester United, who share the record for the biggest win, did not win the league in 1995. They finished a point behind Blackburn Rovers with a goal difference eight better than the champions'. The season in which that happened is one of only three Blackburn titles on our list of English football champions, and it is a useful corrective to the idea that margins of victory win championships.
Southampton 0-9 Leicester: the biggest away win on its own
It was a Friday night, it was raining hard on the south coast, and it was 1-0 after ten minutes.
Ben Chilwell scored the first. In the build-up Ryan Bertrand had caught Ayoze Pérez with a high challenge, and after the goal was given the video assistant referee intervened. Bertrand was sent off in the twelfth minute. Southampton were a goal and a man down with seventy-eight to play, at home, against a Leicester side that Brendan Rodgers had set up to counter-attack at speed.
- Tenth minuteBen Chilwell scores from close range. A VAR review of a challenge in the build-up follows.
- Twelfth minuteRyan Bertrand is sent off. Southampton play the remaining seventy-eight minutes with ten men.
- By half-timeYouri Tielemans, Ayoze Pérez twice and Jamie Vardy make it 5-0 at the interval.
- Just before the hourPérez completes his hat-trick and Vardy scores his second within a minute of each other. 7-0.
- Eighty-fifth minuteJames Maddison curls in a free-kick for the eighth.
- Stoppage timeVardy converts a penalty for his hat-trick and the ninth, equalling the Premier League record.
Southampton 0-9 Leicester City, 25 October 2019. Scorers and timings as recorded in the official match report.
Two players scoring hat-tricks for the same team in one Premier League match had happened only once before, when Jermaine Pennant and Robert Pirès did it for Arsenal against Southampton in 2003. Southampton, again.
Before that night the widest away win in the Premier League had been Manchester United's 8-1 at Nottingham Forest in February 1999, the match in which Ole Gunnar Solskjær came off the bench and scored four in the closing minutes. The widest in the whole history of the top division had been eight goals, twice: Sunderland's 9-1 at Newcastle United in December 1908 and Wolverhampton Wanderers' 9-1 at Cardiff City in September 1955. Leicester's nine-goal margin went past all three. It is the biggest away win in 131 years of English top-flight football, and nobody has matched it since.
What happened next is the stranger part. Southampton's players and coaching staff gave their wages for the day to the club's charitable foundation. Hasenhüttl kept his job. In January, eleven weeks later, Southampton went to the King Power Stadium for the return fixture and won 2-1. They finished eleventh.
The away dimension matters more than it might seem. A home side that is being overrun has a crowd to answer to and tends to keep trying to attack, which is exactly what a team with ten men should not do. Three of the four 9-0s were home wins. The one away win came against a team that would not, or could not, shut the game down.
How a nine-goal game happens: red cards and half-time scores
Start with what the four matches do not share. Two had early dismissals and two had none. One was in March, one in October, one in February and one in August. One losing side was relegated and three were not.
What they do share is the scoreline at the interval. In every case the match was over by half-time, and in every case the second half was worse than the first or nearly as bad.
That pattern is the real answer to how a nine-goal game happens. Most heavy defeats stop at four or five because the losing side changes shape at half-time, puts ten men behind the ball, and the winning side, three points secure, takes off its best players and eases down. A 9-0 requires both of those things to fail at once.
The sending-off
A red card in the opening quarter of an hour is the most reliable ingredient. Alexandre Jankewitz, making his first Premier League start for Southampton at Old Trafford in 2021, was dismissed after 82 seconds. Bertrand went in the twelfth minute in 2019. Playing eighty minutes a man short against one of the division's better attacks is survivable only with a deep defensive block, and neither of those Southampton sides was built to play that way. The 2021 match had a second dismissal late on, Jan Bednarek for conceding a penalty, though that red card was later overturned on appeal. The league's disciplinary records are covered in our guide to the most red cards in Premier League history.
The side that keeps playing
Bournemouth in 2022 had eleven men throughout and still conceded nine. Under Scott Parker they tried to pass out from their own penalty area against the best pressing team in the country, lost the ball in dangerous places, and were five down by the break. Ipswich in 1995 were simply outclassed, a bottom-of-the-table side at the home of the champions.
The winners who do not stop
The last ingredient is on the other side. Cole in 1995 was a new signing with a point to prove. United in 2021 used their substitutes to bring on Anthony Martial and Daniel James, who scored three of the last five between them. Liverpool in 2022 had started the season badly and wanted the goals. A team that is comfortable in the table declares at five. A team with something to prove does not.
Five goals in one match: Cole, Shearer, Defoe, Berbatov and Agüero
Five players have scored five times in a single Premier League game. None has scored six.
| Player | Match | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Andy Cole | Manchester United 9-0 Ipswich Town | 4 March 1995 |
| Alan Shearer | Newcastle United 8-0 Sheffield Wednesday | 19 September 1999 |
| Jermain Defoe | Tottenham Hotspur 9-1 Wigan Athletic | 22 November 2009 |
| Dimitar Berbatov | Manchester United 7-1 Blackburn Rovers | 27 November 2010 |
| Sergio Agüero | Manchester City 6-1 Newcastle United | 3 October 2015 |
Four of the five came in matches won by six goals or more, which is no surprise. The fifth is the interesting one. Agüero's five against Newcastle were scored in a match City had been losing 1-0, in a spell of roughly twenty minutes either side of half-time.
Shearer's five came in Bobby Robson's first home match as Newcastle manager. Defoe's all came in the second half at White Hart Lane, a hat-trick of them inside seven minutes, in a match that had been 1-0 at the interval. That second half finished 8-1, and its nine goals are the most scored in any half of a Premier League match.
Cole's five had no penalties among them. They were also, for a long time, a slightly awkward record, because he had cost a British record fee two months earlier and missed a great many chances in the weeks that followed. United drew 1-1 at West Ham on the last day of the season and lost the league by a point.
Five is a long way short of what the game in England has seen. The top-division record for one player in one match is seven, by Ted Drake for Arsenal at Aston Villa on 14 December 1935, in a 7-1 win in which he is said to have had eight shots. The Football League record is ten, by Joe Payne for Luton Town against Bristol Rovers in the Third Division South on 13 April 1936. Payne was a reserve half-back playing centre-forward because of injuries. Luton won 12-0.
The longer careers behind these afternoons are set out in our list of the Premier League's all-time top goalscorers, where Shearer, Cole and Agüero all rank near the top.
The eight-goal tier, from Newcastle 8-0 to Sheffield United 0-8
Below the four 9-0s are seven matches won by eight.
| Date | Result | What stood out |
|---|---|---|
| 19 September 1999 | Newcastle United 8-0 Sheffield Wednesday | Shearer's five |
| 22 November 2009 | Tottenham Hotspur 9-1 Wigan Athletic | 1-0 at half-time |
| 9 May 2010 | Chelsea 8-0 Wigan Athletic | Chelsea won the title that afternoon |
| 23 December 2012 | Chelsea 8-0 Aston Villa | Seven different scorers |
| 18 October 2014 | Southampton 8-0 Sunderland | Opened with a volleyed own goal |
| 21 September 2019 | Manchester City 8-0 Watford | 5-0 after eighteen minutes |
| 24 September 2023 | Sheffield United 0-8 Newcastle United | Eight different scorers |
Some clubs recur. Wigan Athletic lost by eight twice in the same season, 2009-10, and stayed up. Southampton won by eight in 2014 and then lost by nine in 2019 and 2021, which makes them the only club to appear on both sides of the top two tiers. Newcastle United have the first match on this table and the last, twenty-four years apart, one at St James' Park and one at Bramall Lane.
Chelsea's 8-0 over Wigan is the only one of the eleven biggest wins that decided something on the day. It was the final afternoon of the 2009-10 season, Chelsea needed a win to be champions, and Wigan had a man sent off in the first half. Carlo Ancelotti's side finished with 103 league goals, the first time a Premier League team had passed a hundred.
Manchester City against Watford in 2019 holds a record of its own for speed. City scored after 52 seconds and were five ahead in the eighteenth minute, the fastest any Premier League team has reached that lead. At that rate the final score would have been twenty-five. It finished eight because City, as teams in that position nearly always do, slowed down. The competition's quickest individual goals are a separate subject, covered in our guide to the fastest Premier League goal.
Newcastle's win at Sheffield United was the widest away margin outside Leicester's, and the first Premier League match in which eight different players scored for one team without any help from an own goal. It came a month into a season in which Sheffield United would concede 104 times, the most by any club in a Premier League campaign.
Highest-scoring matches rather than widest margins
A heavy defeat and a high-scoring game are different things, and the record for the second has nothing to do with dominance.
| Date | Result | Goals |
|---|---|---|
| 29 September 2007 | Portsmouth 7-4 Reading | 11 |
| 29 December 2007 | Tottenham Hotspur 6-4 Reading | 10 |
| 22 November 2009 | Tottenham Hotspur 9-1 Wigan Athletic | 10 |
| 28 August 2011 | Manchester United 8-2 Arsenal | 10 |
| 29 December 2012 | Arsenal 7-3 Newcastle United | 10 |
| 19 May 2013 | West Bromwich Albion 5-5 Manchester United | 10 |
Portsmouth 7-4 Reading, at Fratton Park, is the only Premier League match with eleven goals. Benjani scored a hat-trick for Portsmouth. Reading were also the losing side in the first of the ten-goal games three months later, when Dimitar Berbatov scored four for Tottenham. Steve Coppell's team scored eight goals in those two away matches and took no points from them.
All six of these matches were played between 2007 and 2013. That clustering is probably not chance. It was a period when several mid-table sides played open football without the defensive organisation to support it, before the detailed pressing structures that most Premier League clubs now use had spread through the division.
The 5-5 at The Hawthorns is the only draw on the list and the highest-scoring draw in the competition's history. It was Ferguson's last match as Manchester United manager. United led 3-0 and then 5-2, and West Brom scored three in the final ten minutes, with Romelu Lukaku, on loan from Chelsea, completing a hat-trick as a substitute.
Arsenal are on the table twice, once on each side. Their 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford in August 2011 was the club's heaviest since the nineteenth century and led directly to a burst of signings before the transfer deadline three days later. Sixteen months on they beat Newcastle 7-3 in a match that was level at 3-3 with twenty minutes left.
What a record defeat does next
Eleven Premier League matches have been lost by eight goals or more. The clubs on the wrong end of them had, between them, ten seasons affected, since Wigan managed it twice in one. In four of those ten seasons the club was relegated. In six it stayed up.
That is a better survival rate than the scorelines suggest, and the managers did better still.
George Burley had been Ipswich manager for barely two months when his side lost 9-0. Ipswich went down, and Burley stayed for another seven years, took them back up and finished fifth in the Premier League in 2001. Roberto Martínez survived both of Wigan's eight-goal defeats in 2009-10. Paul Lambert survived Villa's at Stamford Bridge. Hasenhüttl survived the 2019 defeat and the 2021 one, fifteen months apart, and remained at Southampton until late 2022.
The exceptions were quick. Bournemouth dismissed Scott Parker three days after Anfield, though the result was the occasion more than the cause: he had said publicly that the squad was not equipped for the division. Bournemouth finished fifteenth under his replacement. Paul Heckingbottom lasted about ten weeks at Sheffield United after the 8-0, and Quique Sánchez Flores about the same at Watford. Both clubs went down.
Southampton, twice
Losing 9-0 once is an accident. Losing 9-0 twice inside sixteen months under the same manager suggests a method with a known failure mode. Hasenhüttl's Southampton were, for most of that period, a well-coached mid-table side that beat better teams by pressing them into mistakes. When the press was bypassed, or when a red card removed a player from it, there was nothing behind it. The club evidently judged that the trade was worth making, since it kept him both times and finished eleventh and fifteenth.
There is a wider point in that. A single catastrophic result tells a board very little about a manager, and the better-run clubs seem to know it. The four sides that were relegated after an eight-goal defeat were all in serious trouble before the match was played. The scoreline was a symptom.
The refunds
A small tradition has grown up around these games. Wigan's players reimbursed the supporters who had travelled to Tottenham in 2009. Sunderland's did the same after the 8-0 at Southampton in 2014. Southampton's squad made its donation in 2019. It costs a Premier League dressing room very little and it changes nothing about the result, but it acknowledges something true: that a heavy away defeat is watched to the end by a few thousand people who paid to be there and could not turn it off.
Goal difference and why the margin matters
A 9-0 win is worth three points, the same as a 1-0. The extra eight goals matter only if a club finishes level on points with another, when goal difference is the first thing the Premier League uses to separate them. The full sequence is set out in our guide to how Premier League tiebreakers work.
Most seasons it does not come to that at the top. Once, it did.
In 2011-12 Manchester City and Manchester United both finished on 89 points. City were champions on goal difference, plus 64 to plus 56. The gap of eight is almost entirely accounted for by one match: City's 6-1 win at Old Trafford on 23 October 2011, which was worth five to City's column and cost United five from theirs. Rework that single result as a 1-0 City win and the two clubs finish with identical records, 88 scored and 28 conceded. Level on points, on goal difference and on goals scored, the title would have gone to a play-off. No scoreline in the competition's history has mattered more, and by margin it was nowhere near the biggest wins.
At the bottom, the clearest case is Reading in 2007-08. They finished level on 36 points with Fulham and were relegated with a goal difference of minus 25 to Fulham's minus 22. Three goals. Reading had lost 7-4 at Portsmouth that season, by three, in the highest-scoring match the league has seen. Any heavy defeat could be singled out in the same way, of course, and their 6-4 at Tottenham would do as well. That is the point. Goal difference is the sum of every lapse over thirty-eight matches, and a side that concedes seven in an afternoon has spent margin it may need in May. How the bottom three are settled is explained in our guide to Premier League relegation.
European places turn on it too. In 2019-20 Tottenham and Wolves finished level on 59 points, Tottenham took sixth on a goal difference three better, and seventh that year carried no European football at all.
Set against those, the four 9-0s were oddly inconsequential. United's in 1995 did not win them the title. Leicester's in 2019 did not get them into the top four. Neither United in 2020-21 nor Liverpool in 2022-23 finished level on points with a club around them, so those goals decided nothing. The record wins have been records and nothing more.
Top-flight records before 1992: the two 12-0s
The Premier League's nine is three short of what the old First Division managed.
West Bromwich Albion beat Darwen 12-0 on 4 April 1892, in the Football League's fourth season. Darwen were a small Lancashire club in their first year in the League, finished bottom, and conceded 112 goals in 26 matches. The gap between the best and worst sides in a fourteen-club division of part-time professionals was of a kind that no longer exists.
Nottingham Forest equalled it on 21 April 1909, beating Leicester Fosse 12-0. Three Forest players scored hat-tricks. The result was so far out of line, and so helpful to Forest's fight against relegation, that the Football League held an inquiry. It found no evidence of anything improper and an entirely human explanation: several Leicester players had been celebrating the wedding of a former team-mate in the days before the match. Leicester Fosse were already certain to go down. The club became Leicester City ten years later.
Those are the two widest margins. The highest score by one side in a top-division match is also twelve.
Double figures stayed reasonably common until the Second World War and then thinned out. Tottenham beat Everton 10-4 in October 1958, in Bill Nicholson's first match as manager. Fulham beat Ipswich Town 10-1 on Boxing Day 1963, a day on which the ten First Division fixtures produced 66 goals, and that remains the last time a side reached ten in the English top flight. The nearest approach afterwards was Liverpool's 9-0 against Crystal Palace in September 1989, with eight different scorers, three years before the Premier League began.
So the modern 9-0s did not break new ground. They matched the widest top-division margins seen since the war and fell one goal short of Fulham's total. For the full background to the competition those older records belong to, see our history of the Football League.
The Football League record of 13-0 and Preston's 26-0
Below the top division the numbers get larger.
Stockport County beat Halifax Town 13-0 in the Third Division North on 6 January 1934. It was 2-0 at half-time, which means Stockport scored eleven in the second forty-five minutes. Nothing in the first half hinted at it. This was a mid-season fixture between two established Third Division sides, and the eleven-goal collapse belongs to an era in which a team that lost its shape, or a player to injury, had no bench to turn to.
Newcastle United matched it on 5 October 1946, beating Newport County 13-0 in the Second Division. Len Shackleton, signed from Bradford Park Avenue that week, scored six on his debut. Newport were relegated at the end of the season.
The highest aggregate in a League match came between those two dates. Tranmere Rovers beat Oldham Athletic 13-4 on Boxing Day 1935, seventeen goals, with Bunny Bell scoring nine of them. Oldham had won the reverse fixture the day before.
And then there is Preston. On 15 October 1887, in the first round of the FA Cup, Preston North End beat Hyde 26-0. It is the record score in English first-class football and will remain so. Preston were about to become the first champions of the Football League, founded the following year; Hyde were a two-year-old amateur club. Accounts of the match differ on how the goals were divided, which is typical of the period. What happened in the Cup after that is told in our history of the FA Cup.
North of the border the record is larger still. Arbroath's 36-0 win over Bon Accord in the Scottish Cup in September 1885 is the widest margin in senior British football, set against opponents who are said to have been a cricket club invited by mistake.
Why double-figure scores died out
Four changes did most of it, and none of them is a single date.
Substitutes. Until 1965 an English league side that lost a player to injury carried on with ten, or left him limping on the wing. A goalkeeper who broke a finger was replaced by a full-back in a borrowed jersey. Many of the freak scores of the 1930s have an injured or absent goalkeeper somewhere in the match report. One substitute was permitted from 1965-66, at first only for injuries, and the number has risen in stages to five from a bench of nine. The present position is in our guide to Premier League substitution rules.
Fitness and full-time professionalism. Conditioning between the wars was rudimentary by modern standards and squads were small. Sides tired badly in the last half-hour, and a team that was 3-0 down and exhausted could concede eight more. Every club in the top four divisions now trains full time, and a well-conditioned side that has stopped trying to win can still run.
Goalkeeping and defensive coaching. A modern goalkeeper is a specialist with a dedicated coach. Defences are drilled as units. When a match is lost, the losing side has a rehearsed way of making itself hard to score against, and uses it.
A narrower gap. Darwen in 1892 were not a professional outfit in any sense a modern supporter would recognise. The weakest team in the Premier League has a squad of internationals and a share of the same central broadcast income as the champions. The distance between first and twentieth is large in points. In ability, on a given afternoon, it is far smaller than the distance between West Bromwich Albion and Darwen.
The offside law pushed the other way for a time. In 1925 the number of defenders required between an attacker and the goal line was cut from three to two, and scoring across the Football League rose by more than a third in a single season. The inter-war years, when most of the double-figure league scores were recorded, were played under that new law by defences that had not yet worked out how to cope with it.
There is also the matter of intent. A team leading 5-0 after an hour in 1935 had its best eleven on the pitch and no reason to do anything but carry on. A team leading 5-0 after an hour now makes three changes, protects its forwards for the next match and passes the ball sideways. That is why a ten remains unlikely, and why the four 9-0s all needed winners with a particular reason to keep going.
Comebacks as the other record margin
The widest lead ever lost in the Premier League is four goals, and it has happened once.
On 5 February 2011 Arsenal were 4-0 up at St James' Park after 26 minutes. Abou Diaby was sent off five minutes into the second half. Joey Barton scored two penalties, Leon Best got one from open play, and in the 87th minute Cheick Tioté volleyed in from twenty-five yards to make it 4-4. No other Premier League side has led by four and failed to win.
Coming from three behind to win outright had been done five times by the end of 2025-26.
| Date | Result | The deficit |
|---|---|---|
| 8 November 1997 | Leeds United 4-3 Derby County | 0-3 in the first half |
| 9 September 1998 | West Ham United 3-4 Wimbledon | 0-3 in the first half |
| 29 September 2001 | Tottenham Hotspur 3-5 Manchester United | 0-3 at half-time |
| 25 October 2003 | Wolverhampton Wanderers 4-3 Leicester City | 0-3 at half-time |
| 13 March 2024 | Bournemouth 4-3 Luton Town | 0-3 at half-time |
Two of the five were away from home, which is harder than it sounds: Wimbledon at Upton Park and Manchester United at White Hart Lane, where they scored five in the second half. The Bournemouth match had an unusual history. The original fixture in December 2023 was abandoned when Luton's captain, Tom Lockyer, collapsed on the pitch, and the comeback came in the rearranged game three months later.
These belong on a page about the biggest Premier League wins because they are the same record measured from the other direction. A 9-0 is the largest margin a side has finished with. Four is the largest it has thrown away, and three the largest it has overturned. Between them they mark the edges of what has happened in the division: no lead of five has ever been lost, and no deficit of four has ever been turned into a win.
There is a symmetry in how they come about, too. The 9-0s needed a losing side that could not stop and a winning side that would not. The comebacks needed a leading side that did stop, usually at half-time and usually without meaning to. Arsenal at Newcastle had the red card as well. Further records from the competition are gathered on our England hub and in our wider football coverage.