Premier League All Time Top Goalscorers and Records
Where the premier league all time top goalscorers list actually stands, why raw totals mislead, and how England's record scorers were verified.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Premier League19 min read
- Competition founded
- 1992
- Record total
- 260
- Record holder
- Alan Shearer
- Most in one match
- 5
Alan Shearer's last Premier League goal was a penalty at the Stadium of Light in April 2006, in a Tyne-Wear derby, and he was carried off in the same match with the knee injury that ended his career. It was his 260th. Two decades of English top-flight football have gone by since and nobody has come within fifty of it. That one fact shapes everything below, because it means the interesting arguments about the Premier League all-time top goalscorers are not about who is first. They are about the order underneath, and about how much of that order is an artefact of how the goals were counted rather than how they were scored.
The list, and the size of the gap at the top
Shearer's 260 splits into 112 for Blackburn Rovers and 148 for Newcastle United. The Blackburn portion came in four seasons, a rate almost nobody in English football has sustained; the Newcastle portion came over a decade and includes the long tail of a career spent as a target man with a rebuilt knee.
Behind him the shape of the list is a cluster rather than a queue.
The distance from first to second is larger than the distance from second to seventh. Kane, Rooney, Cole, Aguero, Lampard and Henry are separated by less than forty goals between them — one strong season, in other words — and their positions relative to each other have swapped several times as careers ended. Shearer's is a different kind of number.
There is a structural reason the top of the list looks the way it does, and it is worth naming. The Premier League ran to 42 games a season until 1995, when it cut to 20 clubs and 38 matches. Shearer scored through both formats. Everyone who arrived later has had four fewer fixtures a year to work with. It is a small edge and it does not explain a fifty-goal gap, but any comparison across eras in English football has to acknowledge that the denominator changed. Our guide to the Premier League and the old First Division covers the wider version of that problem, which is what happens when you try to compare 1992 onwards with everything before it.
The Blackburn seasons are the part people forget. Shearer won the Premier League's leading scorer award three years running, in 1994-95, 1995-96 and 1996-97, the first two at Blackburn and the third after his move to Newcastle. Nobody else has taken it three seasons in succession. Those three campaigns alone account for a substantial chunk of the total, and they came at an age when most forwards are still working out what they are, which is the honest answer to why the gap at the top is the size it is.
Below the top seven the names that follow are Robbie Fowler on 163, Jermain Defoe on 162, Michael Owen on 150, Les Ferdinand on 149 and Teddy Sheringham on 146. Five English forwards in a row.
Where the English scorers rank
That run is not a coincidence, and it is the most striking thing about the list. Shearer, Kane, Rooney and Cole occupy four of the top five places. Lampard is sixth. Fowler, Defoe, Owen, Ferdinand and Sheringham fill most of the next ten.
The Premier League has been the most cosmopolitan league in Europe for most of its existence, and the England national team has spent much of that period being criticised for a shortage of goalscorers. Both things are true at once, which is awkward and worth sitting with. The explanation is partly arithmetic. English players are eligible for every club in the competition without a work permit, they arrive at seventeen rather than twenty-four, and they tend to stay in England for a whole career rather than the three or four peak seasons an overseas signing might spend here. A total is a function of time on the pitch as much as of ability, and English forwards have simply had more of it.
Frank Lampard's 177 is a separate case and the highest by anyone who was not a centre-forward. Nobody has beaten it from midfield.
Steven Gerrard finished on 120, all of them for Liverpool. Ian Wright reached 113, mostly at Arsenal and mostly after the age of twenty-eight, which is a reminder that the list rewards late peaks as readily as early ones. Emile Heskey and Peter Crouch both crossed a hundred without ever being the leading scorer in a season, purely by playing top-flight football in England for a very long time.
The English record for a single club belongs to Kane. His 213 were all scored for Tottenham Hotspur, and that is the highest Premier League total any player has produced for one club — higher than Shearer's Newcastle figure, higher than Rooney's Manchester United figure. If you want one number that captures both volume and loyalty, it is that one.
The hundred-goal club and who keeps joining it
Membership has passed thirty and rises by a name every season or two. This page does not print a running count, because the moment an active player scores his hundredth the number is wrong, and a wrong number is worse than none.
What is stable is the shape of the entry criteria. A hundred Premier League goals means, in round terms, six or seven seasons as a first-choice attacker at a club that creates chances, without a long injury. That is a demanding career rather than an exceptional one. It is why the club has grown steadily instead of in bursts.
| Milestone | What it usually takes |
|---|---|
| 50 goals | Three to four seasons as a regular starter |
| 100 goals | Six to seven seasons, no long-term injury |
| 150 goals | A decade in the competition, or a very high peak rate |
| 200 goals | Reached by a handful of players in the competition's history |
| 260 goals | Reached once |
Shearer got to his hundredth in 124 appearances, and for a long stretch of the competition's history that was the fastest anyone had done it. It has since been beaten by Erling Haaland, whose rate at Manchester City has been the sharpest the competition has seen. Because Haaland is still playing in England no career total for him appears on this page, but the record for fewest games to a hundred is a completed achievement, and it is his.
The fastest-to-100 measure is also the one most sensitive to circumstance. A striker at a side that dominates possession and wins a lot of penalties will get there quicker than one of equal ability at a side that defends deep. Neither is cheating. It does mean the metric describes a situation at least as much as it describes a player.
What the club looks like from inside
Two things about the membership are worth noticing. The first is that it skews heavily towards players who spent their whole prime in England rather than passing through, which is why the club contains English and Irish names out of all proportion to the competition's overall make-up. The second is that a large minority got there without ever winning the league. Scoring a hundred is a durability test, and durability is distributed more evenly across the table than trophies are.
Most members cross the line somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty. A forward who arrives in England at twenty-five, however good, is starting the clock late, and several of the best strikers to have played in the Premier League never joined the club for that reason alone. Their absence from the list says nothing about them.
Minutes per goal, and why the raw total flatters some careers
Appearances are the wrong unit and everyone in football knows it. A substitute appearance in the 87th minute counts the same as ninety minutes as the lone striker.
- 260Alan Shearer's total
- 213Harry Kane's total for Tottenham
- 5Most goals by one player in a match
- 177Frank Lampard's midfield record
Completed records for players whose English careers are finished. Not a live leaderboard.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is the standing example. His Premier League career at Manchester United produced a modest total by the standards of this list, yet a large share of it came after coming off the bench, and his goals-per-minute figure sits well above players who finished ahead of him. The nickname followed him around for a reason. Judged by the raw column he is a good striker who was often not picked. Judged by minutes he is one of the most efficient finishers the competition has had.
The reverse case is more common and less discussed. A striker who plays 300 full matches over eleven seasons for a mid-table side will accumulate a total that reads as elite without once being the best forward in the country. That is not a criticism of him. It is a criticism of the column.
The substitution rules have moved underneath all of this, which complicates any comparison across eras. The Premier League ran with three substitutes from a bench that grew over the years, then adopted five substitutes from three separate stoppages for the 2022-23 season after a period of temporary emergency permissions. Five subs changes the distribution of minutes across a squad: more forwards get twenty-minute cameos, fewer play ninety, and the number of appearances a striker racks up in a season rises without the number of minutes rising with it. Any goals-per-appearance figure that spans both eras is comparing two different things and should be treated accordingly.
Two adjustments make the list more honest and neither is standard. The first is minutes per goal, which corrects for substitutes and for players who were rotated. The second is share of team goals, which corrects for the quality of supply — scoring 15 in a side that scores 40 is a different achievement from scoring 15 in a side that scores 90. Both are calculable from published match data. Neither appears on the official list, which orders by total and nothing else, because the official list is a record of fact rather than an argument about merit. The Golden Boot has the same property at the seasonal level, and attracts the same complaints.
The strikers who scored for four, five, six English clubs
There is a particular kind of Premier League career that the all-time list captures badly: the forward who kept scoring, kept moving, and ended up with a substantial total assembled from fragments.
Nicolas Anelka scored Premier League goals for Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Bolton Wanderers, Chelsea and West Bromwich Albion. Six clubs, six sets of team-mates, six different roles. He won the Golden Boot at Chelsea and was a teenage title winner at Arsenal, and his career total is respectable rather than remarkable in a way that badly understates how good he was in any given season.
Craig Bellamy's goals are spread across Coventry City, Newcastle United, Blackburn Rovers, Liverpool, West Ham United, Manchester City and Cardiff City. Seven. The record for most clubs scored for has been contested over the years — the counting depends on whether you include a single goal in a short loan spell — but Bellamy's spread is the one usually cited, and it is a genuinely unusual football career rather than a statistical curiosity.
Robbie Keane managed six. Les Ferdinand scored for QPR, Newcastle, Tottenham, West Ham, Leicester City and Bolton.
What these careers share is that no single club's supporters claim them, so their totals are rarely mentioned in the places where reputations get made: the club histories, the anniversary features, the songs on the terrace. A player who scores 40 for one club is remembered there forever. A player who scores 20 for six clubs is remembered nowhere in particular, and has scored 120.
The counter-argument is that moving that often is itself evidence of something — a player good enough to keep being signed and not quite good enough to keep. Both readings are defensible and the numbers do not settle it.
One badge, every goal: the single-club scorers
Matt Le Tissier reached exactly 100 Premier League goals, every one of them for Southampton, most of them in seasons when the club was fighting near the bottom of the table. He turned down moves. The round number is a coincidence. That it happened at all, in that side, is not.
Kane's 213 for Tottenham is the largest single-club figure in the competition. Gerrard's 120 were all Liverpool's. Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes each passed a hundred without ever wearing anything but Manchester United's shirt, which for two midfielders across that many seasons is a substantial haul.
Loyalty in the goal charts has become rarer for reasons that have nothing to do with character. Contract lengths, agent structures, the size of the fees involved and the way squads are now assembled all push against a fifteen-year stay. A player who signs at nineteen and leaves at thirty-four has usually had at least one summer where the club decided to keep him rather than the other way round.
There is also a survivorship effect worth naming. The single-club scorers we celebrate are the ones whose clubs stayed in the division. A one-club forward at a side that was relegated twice has a Premier League total interrupted by seasons in the Championship that do not count towards it, and the all-time list simply does not see them. That is not a flaw in the record. It is a limit on what the record measures, and it explains why the honours boards at some very well-supported English clubs contain names that will never appear on any of these tables. The wider version of that story is in our guide to life after relegation from the Premier League.
Hat-tricks, and the three minutes that hold the record
Sergio Aguero scored twelve Premier League hat-tricks, which is the record, and Alan Shearer scored eleven. The two of them are clear of the field. Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Thierry Henry and Harry Kane all sit in the group behind.
Hat-tricks measure something different from career totals. They cluster in the seasons when a player is fit, first-choice and taking the penalties, and they disappear entirely in the seasons when any one of those things is missing. A player can score 20 in a season across 20 matches and register none. Another can score 20 in 14 matches and register three.
The fastest Premier League hat-trick is Sadio Mane's, for Southampton against Aston Villa at St Mary's in May 2015. Two minutes and fifty-six seconds. Robbie Fowler's, for Liverpool against Arsenal at Anfield in 1994, stood at four minutes and thirty-three seconds for more than two decades before it fell.
The five-goal list
Five goals in one Premier League match has been done by Andy Cole, Alan Shearer, Jermain Defoe, Dimitar Berbatov and Sergio Aguero. Every one of those came in a home win by a wide margin, which is the only circumstance in which a manager leaves a striker on for the full ninety minutes of a rout. Cole's came in Manchester United's 9-0 defeat of Ipswich Town in 1995. Shearer's came in Newcastle's 8-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday in 1999. Defoe scored all five of his in the first half against Wigan Athletic.
Nobody has scored six. Given how the last three decades have gone, that will probably hold a while yet.
Penalties, and how the spot-kick changes the leaderboard
Take penalties away and the list reorders. Not dramatically, but enough to matter, and this is the objection most often raised against every name near the top.
Shearer took and converted more Premier League penalties than anyone. A meaningful share of his 260 came from twelve yards, and the same is true of most players in the top ten, because a club's designated penalty taker is almost always its designated centre-forward. That is a selection effect rather than an inflation. A manager gives the penalties to the man he trusts to score, and the man he trusts to score is the man already scoring.
The honest position is that penalty goals are real goals taken under real pressure, and that a career total including them is not fraudulent. The equally honest position is that a striker who has taken 60 penalties has been handed 60 chances at roughly a three-in-four conversion rate that a team-mate of similar ability was not.
| Factor | Effect on a career total |
|---|---|
| Designated penalty taker | Adds several goals a season in a side that attacks a lot |
| Loss of penalty duty mid-career | A visible dip with nothing to do with form |
| Playing for a possession-dominant side | More penalties awarded, more chances at a high conversion rate |
| Playing as a lone striker in a deep block | Fewer penalties, fewer touches in the area |
One quirk in the counting is worth knowing. A penalty saved and then scored from the rebound is recorded as a goal in open play, not a penalty, which means the penalty-conversion figures published for any player are slightly kinder than his record from the spot in the strictest sense. A retaken penalty counts once. An awarded penalty that is missed disappears from the goal record entirely and survives only in the shots column, which is why a striker's reputation from twelve yards is built almost as much on what is not counted as on what is.
The rule itself has been revised, which affects the numbers in a way few people notice. Goalkeepers must now keep at least part of one foot on or in line with the goal line at the moment of the kick, a change to the Laws of the Game that tightened an old and widely ignored requirement. Conversion rates over the competition's history are not being measured under identical conditions from start to finish, and any comparison of penalty records across eras carries that caveat.
Midfielders and defenders in the scoring charts
Lampard's 177 is the outlier that defines the category. He scored from midfield at a volume no defender or midfielder has approached, arriving late in the box with a consistency the position had not previously produced, and he took penalties for much of it.
Steven Gerrard on 120, Paul Scholes on 107 and Ryan Giggs on 109 are the next tier, three English top-flight careers that each ran well past a decade. What links them is not a style. Gerrard scored from thirty yards, Scholes from the edge of the area, Giggs from wide positions cutting in. What links them is longevity in a single side that was consistently good.
Defenders are a different order of magnitude. John Terry is the highest-scoring defender in Premier League history, with a total in the low forties, almost all of it from set pieces at the near post. That is what a career of being the best header of a ball in a side that wins a lot of corners looks like, and it is roughly a sixth of what the leading forwards manage.
Full-backs who take penalties distort the defensive list in the same way strikers distort the main one. A defender with spot-kick duty can double the total of a better defender without it.
The structural point underneath all of this: the Premier League records goals by player, not by position, and position is not a fixed attribute anyway. Several players in the top thirty played as attacking midfielders for part of their careers and as forwards for the rest. Any table that sorts by role is making a judgement call about where a player's minutes were spent, and different sources make it differently. That is one reason the official record does not attempt it.
The scorers who kept clubs up rather than winning titles
Kevin Phillips scored 30 league goals for Sunderland in the 1999-2000 season and won the European Golden Shoe for it, the only English player to have done so. Sunderland finished seventh. It is the best individual scoring season by an Englishman in the competition and it produced no medal of any kind.
That is the category the all-time list handles worst.
Le Tissier's hundred at Southampton were scored across seasons in which the club's realistic ambition was seventeenth. Ian Wright's Crystal Palace goals, before Arsenal, came in a side promoted and then relegated. Rickie Lambert, Charlie Austin, Grant Holt, Kevin Nolan — a whole tier of English forwards spent their best years turning one-goal defeats into draws for clubs whose survival depended on it, and their career totals read as ordinary.
The counting problem is that a goal in a 1-0 win at the bottom of the table and a goal in a 5-0 win at the top are worth the same on the list and worth wildly different amounts to the club that got them. Analysts have tried to correct this with points-added measures, which assign each goal a value based on how much it changed the expected points from that fixture. Those measures produce very different orderings and none of them is official.
There is a fairness argument that runs the other way too. Playing for a bad side means fewer chances, worse service and more matches spent chasing the ball, all of which suppress the total. Playing for a good one means the opposite. Neither the list nor its critics can fully separate the player from the supply, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a metric. What a promoted club's forward is actually up against is set out in our guide to surviving a first Premier League season.
Who verifies a Premier League goal
Somebody has to decide whether a shot that took a decisive touch off a defender belongs to the striker or the defender, and that decision moves career totals.
- On the pitchThe referee signals the goal and the match report records the time and the apparent scorer.
- Live captureThe competition's official data provider logs scorer, assist and touch sequence in real time from the ground.
- Deflection queryWhere a shot takes a decisive touch off another player, the credit is examined rather than left with the on-pitch assumption.
- Club representationA club may query a credit on a player's behalf, most commonly where an own goal has been recorded against a defender.
- Record amendedIf the credit changes, the official record is updated and every career total that depends on it moves with it.
The sequence by which a scorer is recorded and, where necessary, changed. The composition of the review body has been revised more than once.
For most of the competition's history this was handled by a Dubious Goals Panel, a small group that reviewed contested credits and issued rulings. The arrangement has changed since, with the review responsibility moving between the league and its data provider, and the details of who sits in judgement now are less publicised than they used to be. The principle has not changed. The official scorer is whoever the record says, and the record can be corrected.
This matters more than it sounds. Careers sit on single-digit margins in the tables below the top, and a reassignment years after the event can move a player up or down a place. It has happened. It is also why totals published by different outlets occasionally disagree by one or two: they are working from records amended at different times.
The Premier League's own published statistics are the authority for anything in this section, and where a figure here differs from theirs, theirs is right. Fixed records for retired players are safe to state; anything involving a player still turning out in England is not, which is why this page has left those alone. More on the wider competition sits in our Premier League champions history, and the international side of the ledger is in England's all-time top goalscorers. The England guides hub collects the rest of the football section, and our football coverage carries the reporting.