WSL All-Time Top Scorers: The Record and the Chasers
The WSL all time top scorers in England's top flight: Vivianne Miedema's record, the strikers chasing it, every Golden Boot winner and the single-season marks.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Women's Football22 min read
- Record holder
- Vivianne Miedema
- Record taken
- 18 October 2020
- Single-season record
- 22 goals
- Most in one match
- 6, Miedema, December 2019
Bristol City arrived at Meadow Park on 1 December 2019 and conceded eleven. Vivianne Miedema scored six of them and set up four more, the most complete individual performance the Women's Super League has seen, and it came in the middle of a three-season spell in which she broke almost every scoring record the league kept. Ten months later she took the biggest of them.
Miedema is the WSL's all-time top scorer. She passed Nikita Parris's total of 49 with a hat-trick against Tottenham Hotspur on 18 October 2020, and at the end of the 2025-26 season she had 97 WSL goals in 136 appearances, 80 for Arsenal and 17 for Manchester City. The nearest challenger is her City team-mate Khadija Shaw, who finished the 2025-26 season on 83. The single-season record is 22 goals, shared by Miedema and Rachel Daly. Every total on this page is a league figure only, counted to the date stated beside it, and every one of them moves while its owner is still playing.
The WSL all-time top scorers list and the record holder
A list of all-time scorers in a league only fifteen full seasons old is still a short one, and its top end is changing fast. We have printed the totals we could confirm against season-by-season records, with the date each one was counted to.
| Player | WSL goals | WSL appearances | Goals per game | Counted to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vivianne Miedema | 97 | 136 | 0.71 | End of 2025-26 |
| Khadija Shaw | 83 | 93 | 0.89 | End of 2025-26 |
| Sam Kerr | 65 | 93 | 0.70 | End of 2025-26 |
| Nikita Parris | 49 | Not stated | Not stated | 18 October 2020, when the record passed |
The Parris row is a record of the moment rather than a career total. She went abroad to Lyon in 2019, returned to the WSL with Arsenal in 2021 and has since added goals for Manchester United, Brighton and London City Lionesses, so her career figure is higher than 49. We have not printed a current total for her because the season-by-season sources disagree by a goal or two.
Below that group sits a cluster of England internationals whose totals we have not printed for the same reason. Bethany England, Ellen White, Beth Mead, Fran Kirby and Rachel Daly all belong high on any all-time list, and their order changes depending on whether a source counts the 2017 Spring Series, which is discussed further down.
Sam Kerr's place on the list
Kerr's total is the one most shaped by things other than form. She joined Chelsea from the NWSL in the middle of 2019-20 and played only four league matches before the season was stopped, scoring once. Then came 21 goals in 2020-21 and 20 in 2021-22, both Golden Boots, both titles; a two-season total of 41 that only Shaw, with 20 and 21 in 2022-23 and 2023-24, has matched. She scored 12 in 2022-23.
A torn anterior cruciate ligament in January 2024 ended that season after eight matches and kept her out of the whole of 2024-25. She returned in September 2025 and scored seven in eighteen league matches in 2025-26. That left her on 65 in 93 at the end of 2025-26, a rate almost identical to Miedema's, reached with a gap of more than a season and a half in the middle.
At the end of 2025-26 Miedema's total was still the higher, by fourteen goals, but Shaw had outscored her in each of the previous four seasons, and the race between two Manchester City team-mates for one record is the real story of the list in the mid-2020s.
- 97Miedema's WSL goals
- 22Single-season record
- 6Most goals in one match
- 3Golden Boot wins for Shaw
League matches only. All four figures are as they stood at the end of the 2025-26 season; the career total moves while Miedema is playing.
How Vivianne Miedema took the record from Nikita Parris
The record has changed hands twice since 2018, and both times it went to someone who scored at a rate the league had not seen before.
Eniola Aluko of Chelsea held it before Parris, having won the Golden Boot in 2016. Parris took it on 4 November 2018, scoring twice for Manchester City in a 3-0 win over Liverpool to reach 37. She was twenty-four, and she added to it through the rest of that season, finishing 2018-19 with 19 goals in 19 league matches. That would have won the Golden Boot in every season before it.
It did not win it in 2018-19, because Miedema scored 22.
Two years, fifty goals
Miedema had arrived at Arsenal from Bayern Munich in 2017 and scored four in eleven league matches in her first season. Then the scoring came all at once. Twenty-two in twenty matches in 2018-19, as Arsenal won the title. Sixteen in fourteen in 2019-20, a season the pandemic cut off in March. By the start of 2020-21 she had 42, and Parris, who had spent 2019-20 with Lyon in France, had 49.
The record went early in the new season. Arsenal beat Tottenham 6-1, Miedema scored a hat-trick, and the third goal took her to 50. She was twenty-four, the same age Parris had been when she took it from Aluko, and she had reached fifty in her fourth WSL season.
- Before November 2018Eniola Aluko of Chelsea, the 2016 Golden Boot winner, leads the all-time list.
- 4 November 2018Nikita Parris scores twice for Manchester City against Liverpool and reaches 37, taking the record.
- 2018-19 seasonParris extends her lead; Miedema scores 22 for Arsenal and begins to close.
- 18 October 2020Miedema's hat-trick in a 6-1 win at Tottenham lifts her to 50, one past Parris's 49.
- 2024 onwardsMiedema moves to Manchester City and keeps adding; Khadija Shaw becomes the nearest challenger.
The holders of the career record in the WSL era. Dates are the matches in which the record passed; totals are the new holder's figure on that day.
Extending it, and slowing down
The rest of Miedema's Arsenal career was less straightforward. She scored 18 in 2020-21 and 14 in 2021-22, then played only eight league matches in 2022-23 after a serious knee injury, and nine in 2023-24. She left Arsenal in 2024 with 80 WSL goals for the club in 106 appearances and joined Manchester City, where she scored seven in 2024-25 and ten in 2025-26.
The chart makes an uncomfortable point. More than half of Miedema's total came in the three seasons from 2018-19 to 2020-21. Had her knee held up, the record would by now be out of reach. As it stands, it is being chased.
The English players high on the list and the clubs they scored for
English scorers have had to share the top of the table with an overseas-born generation that arrived when the league turned professional. The ones who stay near the top have done it over long careers at several clubs, which makes their totals harder to check and easier to under-count.
Nikita Parris scored her WSL goals across a wide spread of clubs: Everton in the early years, then Manchester City, where she was most prolific, then Arsenal, Manchester United, Brighton and London City Lionesses after two seasons in France. She is the only English player to have held the career record.
Bethany England started at Doncaster Rovers Belles, spent most of her career at Chelsea, had a highly productive loan at Liverpool in 2017-18 and moved to Tottenham Hotspur in 2023. She was voted the PFA Players' Player of the Year for 2019-20, scoring 14 in 15 league matches as Chelsea won the title on points per game. Her totals are complicated by the seasons she spent in the second tier with Doncaster, which some sources fold into a career league figure.
Ellen White won the Golden Boot for Birmingham City in 2017-18 with 15 goals, and scored her WSL goals for Arsenal, Notts County, Birmingham and Manchester City before retiring in 2022. She retired as England's record international scorer as well, a different list covered in our guide to England Women's all-time top scorers.
Rachel Daly came to the WSL late, from the American NWSL, and made up for it at once. Her 22 goals for Aston Villa in 2022-23 equalled the single-season record and made her the first English Golden Boot winner since White.
Beth Mead won the Golden Boot as early as 2015 with Sunderland and scored most of her WSL goals for Arsenal. Fran Kirby scored for Reading and Chelsea and is one of five players with three or more WSL hat-tricks.
Why the English totals are lower than their reputations
Two reasons, neither of them about ability. English players have tended to play wide or in a deeper role for clubs that bought a specialist centre-forward, and several spent seasons in the second tier or abroad. Mead's game was built as much on assists as goals, and she sits at the top of the league's assist list. Those are choices of position, not of quality.
Russo and the generation after the Euros
The English strikers adding to their totals now came through after the professional switch, and their numbers will be easier to verify than their predecessors'. Alessia Russo is the clearest example. She came back from university football in the United States to Manchester United, moved to Arsenal in 2023, and shared the 2024-25 Golden Boot with Shaw on twelve goals. That made her the first English player to finish a season as the league's top scorer, even jointly, since Daly.
Russo plays a different role from the strikers above her on the list. She drops deep, links play and is judged at Arsenal as much on what she creates as on what she finishes. That is the profile English clubs and the England team have preferred, and it is one reason the career list may stay dominated by overseas centre-forwards for some time yet. The quickest route up the all-time table is to be the one player in the side whose job is to score, and the WSL's biggest clubs have mostly hired that player from abroad.
Goals per game, raw totals and the problem with the early seasons
A WSL season has not always been the same length, which makes raw totals misleading when they cross eras.
| Season | Clubs | League matches per club |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 to 2015 | 8 | 14 |
| 2016 | 9 | 16 |
| 2017-18 | 10 | 18 |
| 2018-19 | 11 | 20 |
| 2019-20 to 2025-26 | 12 | 22 |
| From 2026-27 | 14 | 26 |
Rachel Williams's 14 goals in 2011 came in a fourteen-match season; Daly's 22 in 2022-23 came in twenty-two. On a per-match basis Williams's year is the more productive, and nobody would call it the better season. The early WSL had fewer clubs, wider gaps in quality between them and, for most of its players, no full-time training. Scoring a goal a game against part-time defences is a different achievement from scoring one against professionals.
The same seasons, adjusted for length
The fairest simple comparison divides a Golden Boot total by the number of league matches each club played that season, not by the player's own appearances. It measures the award against the size of the season, which is what changed.
| Season | Winner | Goals | Club matches in the season | Goals per club match |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Rachel Williams | 14 | 14 | 1.00 |
| 2014 | Karen Carney | 8 | 14 | 0.57 |
| 2018-19 | Vivianne Miedema | 22 | 20 | 1.10 |
| 2022-23 | Rachel Daly | 22 | 22 | 1.00 |
| 2025-26 | Khadija Shaw | 21 | 22 | 0.95 |
On that basis Miedema's 2018-19 is the best Golden Boot season in the league's history, ahead of Daly's record-equalling year. Williams's opening season sits level with Daly. Carney's 2014 total looks thin even after adjustment, and it is. That was the season three clubs finished within a point of each other at the top, and no single striker dominated the scoring.
None of this makes the early-era totals worthless. It makes them a different measurement.
Goals per game corrects for the length of the season and nothing else. It flatters players who were rotated into easy matches and penalises ones who played through injuries. It does reward the obvious: Shaw's 0.89 per game across her City career is well above Miedema's 0.71 and Kerr's 0.70, and it explains why her total has risen so quickly from a later start.
The 2019-20 asterisk
The season that ended in March 2020 was settled on points per game, and every player's total for it is short. Miedema scored 16 in 14 matches. Bethany England's 14 came in 15. Had the remaining fixtures been played, Miedema in particular might well have threatened the single-season record. That season sits in all the tables at its curtailed figure, which is honest, and readers comparing totals should remember it.
Every WSL Golden Boot winner by season
The Golden Boot goes to the leading league scorer of the season. A tie is not broken. When two players finish level, the award is shared, as it was in 2024-25 between Khadija Shaw and Alessia Russo on twelve each. No tie-breaker on assists or minutes played is applied.
The award counts WSL league goals only. Goals in the Women's FA Cup, the League Cup and European competition do not count towards it, and neither do play-off or friendly goals. Penalties count in full. Own goals are credited to nobody.
The race is usually closer than the final table of winners suggests. In 2018-19 Parris finished on 19 for Manchester City, three behind Miedema, and in a season of twenty matches that gap was one good afternoon. In 2024-25 the award was shared at twelve, the lowest winning total of the professional era. Shaw played only fourteen league matches that season, and a striker with a full season's appearances would have needed no great surge to finish clear of both. The low figure says more about that season's distribution of goals than about the strikers.
| Season | Winner | Club | Goals |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Rachel Williams | Birmingham City | 14 |
| 2012 | Kim Little | Arsenal | 11 |
| 2013 | Natasha Dowie | Liverpool | 13 |
| 2014 | Karen Carney | Birmingham City | 8 |
| 2015 | Beth Mead | Sunderland | 12 |
| 2016 | Eniola Aluko | Chelsea | 9 |
| 2017 Spring Series | Fran Kirby | Chelsea | 6 |
| 2017-18 | Ellen White | Birmingham City | 15 |
| 2018-19 | Vivianne Miedema | Arsenal | 22 |
| 2019-20 | Vivianne Miedema | Arsenal | 16 |
| 2020-21 | Sam Kerr | Chelsea | 21 |
| 2021-22 | Sam Kerr | Chelsea | 20 |
| 2022-23 | Rachel Daly | Aston Villa | 22 |
| 2023-24 | Khadija Shaw | Manchester City | 21 |
| 2024-25 | Khadija Shaw and Alessia Russo | Manchester City and Arsenal | 12 |
| 2025-26 | Khadija Shaw | Manchester City | 21 |
What the list shows
Three things stand out. First, the totals in the summer-league years were low. Karen Carney won the 2014 award with eight goals, in a fourteen-match season. Second, an English player has won or shared the award in eight of the full seasons, but only twice after 2017-18: Daly outright and Russo jointly. Third, Shaw's three wins in three seasons from 2023-24 is the longest run of the award by one player, and her 2025-26 total came in the season Manchester City took the title.
Kerr's two awards came in Chelsea title-winning seasons, and Kirby's Spring Series award came as Chelsea won that too. Aluko's in 2016 did not; Chelsea finished second to Manchester City. The Golden Boot and the title have been less closely linked than one might expect. Daly won hers for a Villa side outside the European places, and Mead won hers in Sunderland's first season in the top division.
The single-season record, who shares it and the near misses
Twenty-two goals is the mark. It was set by Miedema in 2018-19 and equalled by Daly in 2022-23, and nobody has broken it, though five seasons have come within two: Kerr's 21 and 20, and Shaw's 20, 21 and 21.
Miedema's version is the more remarkable on the numbers: 22 in a twenty-match season, with Arsenal winning the title and Parris scoring 19 for the runners-up. Daly's came in a twenty-two-match season for a club that finished outside the top four, so a large share of Villa's goals that season went through one player, which is a different kind of achievement from scoring for a champion.
The seasons that came within one
Kerr scored 21 for Chelsea in 2020-21, the first full season after the pandemic, and 20 the year after. Shaw scored 20 in 2022-23 and has scored 21 twice. In 2023-24 she did it in only eighteen appearances, missing four league matches, most of them in the run-in through injury, while City lost the title on goal difference. The arithmetic of what she might have reached is obvious. In 2025-26 she scored 21 again and won the title.
Shaw's 2023-24 season is the strongest case that the record should have fallen. She was averaging more than a goal a game when she stopped playing. Records survive on accidents of that kind more often than supporters remember.
Hat-tricks, four-goal games and the biggest individual afternoons
Rachel Williams scored the first WSL hat-trick, for Birmingham City in a 4-0 win over Liverpool in the 2011 season. Since then the hat-trick list has been led by two players. Khadija Shaw has the most, with eight on the published list counted to March 2026, and Miedema is second with five; Bethany England, Sam Kerr and Fran Kirby have three each.
Shaw drew level with Miedema's five in January 2024 and has moved clear since. Her lead says something about the City sides of the mid-2020s, which tended to win heavily against the bottom half, and about a striker built to finish chances in volume.
Four or more in a match
Miedema's six against Bristol City in December 2019 is the only time anyone has scored more than four in a WSL match. Four has happened more often.
| Date | Player | Club | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 August 2013 | Natasha Dowie | Liverpool | 9-0 v Doncaster Rovers Belles |
| 6 January 2018 | Bethany England | Liverpool | 8-0 v Yeovil Town |
| 16 May 2018 | Nikita Parris | Manchester City | 5-0 v Yeovil Town |
| 1 December 2019 | Vivianne Miedema, six | Arsenal | 11-1 v Bristol City |
| 10 January 2021 | Fran Kirby | Chelsea | 5-0 v Reading |
| 30 April 2022 | Khadija Shaw | Manchester City | 7-2 v Brighton |
| 5 May 2024 | Guro Reiten | Chelsea | 8-0 v Bristol City |
| 27 April 2025 | Shekiera Martinez | West Ham United | 7-1 v Crystal Palace |
| 14 December 2025 | Khadija Shaw | Manchester City | 6-1 v Aston Villa |
Reiten's afternoon mattered more than most. Chelsea won the 2023-24 title on goal difference, level with Manchester City on 55 points, and the 8-0 win over Bristol City in the closing weeks, followed by a 6-0 win at Manchester United on the final day, made the margin. Four goals from a winger in the run-in of a goal-difference title race is the WSL's best example of an individual scoring record changing a championship.
Penalties, headers and assists: the other scoring records
The league keeps more lists than the career total, and they reward different kinds of player.
Penalties. The league does not publish an official penalties list, and provider counts differ. The players near the top of them owe it to a long career and a settled role as the designated taker rather than to a scoring peak. Kim Little, Arsenal's Scottish midfielder and captain, is the type: she won the Golden Boot in 2012, and most of her goals since have come from midfield.
Assists. Beth Mead heads the assist list. Assists are a newer statistic in women's football than goals, and the data for the early seasons is less reliable, so this is one record where the early-era players may be under-represented rather than flattered.
Headers and other subsets. Data providers now break goals down by body part, distance and situation, but the league does not publish an official headed-goals list, and different providers classify the same goal differently. We have not printed figures for those categories. Any record a reader finds for them is a provider's count, not the league's.
Goal contributions. Miedema leads on combined goals and assists as well as on goals. Her six-goal, four-assist afternoon against Bristol City is the reason she is so far ahead on the single-match measure.
The broader point is that scoring records in the women's game are less settled than in the men's. A Premier League goal from the 1990s has been counted and recounted for thirty years. A WSL goal from 2012 may have been recorded on a club website and a league report that do not agree about who touched the ball last.
What counts as a WSL goal: the Spring Series, 2019-20 and the disputed goal
Sources for WSL scoring totals often differ by a goal or two. There are three main reasons.
The 2017 Spring Series. Between the end of the 2016 summer season and the start of the first winter season in September 2017, the WSL played a one-off mini-season of eight matches per club, from February to May 2017. It had no relegation and was not counted as a full season for the title roll. Fran Kirby top-scored with six. Some sources include Spring Series goals in a player's WSL total and some do not, so a player like Kirby, Aluko or Bethany England, who scored in it, can appear with different totals on different sites.
Own goals and deflections. Credit for a deflected shot is decided at the time and sometimes changed afterwards. The league's records and a club's own records do not always follow the same revision.
The curtailed 2019-20 season. Those matches count in full, but no more were added. Nobody disputes that; the effect is to make that season's totals look low.
Cup and European goals. A striker's season total in a club's own records often includes every competition. The WSL figure does not. A player who scores heavily in the League Cup group stage, where top-flight clubs have faced second-tier opposition, or in Champions League qualifying, can have a club total several goals higher than her league total. Most of the confusion readers report about WSL scoring figures comes from comparing an all-competitions number with a league one.
- Spring Series 2017Eight matches per club in a transitional mini-season. Some lists include its goals; others treat it as separate.
- Disputed creditA deflected shot is credited at the time, then sometimes re-awarded, and not every record follows the change.
- Second-tier seasonsA career league total may fold in WSL 2 or Championship goals, which belong to a different division.
- Cut-off dateTotals are counted to different matchdays, so a mid-season figure on one site lags another.
The common reasons published totals disagree. None of them involves a goal being invented; each is a choice about what to count.
The answer is to read every total with its date and its definition. Our figures are WSL top-division league goals, excluding cup goals, counted to the date shown.
Record WSL scorers at the longest-serving clubs
Only Arsenal and Chelsea have been in the top division every season since 2011. Their scoring records show what those clubs have looked like over time.
Arsenal. Miedema's 80 WSL goals for the club is the record and is unlikely to be challenged for some years. Arsenal's leading scorers of the summer-league years, Little among them, scored in short fourteen-match seasons, and the club's later scorers, Mead and Russo among them, have shared goals across a front line rather than relying on one striker.
Chelsea. Kerr's 65 WSL goals across six seasons with a playing appearance is the highest total for the club we could confirm. Kirby and Bethany England are her rivals for the club record, and their totals depend on whether Spring Series goals are counted. Chelsea's sustained success between 2019-20 and 2024-25 spread goals around the squad more than at any other club.
Manchester City. Shaw is the club's leading WSL scorer and the second-highest scorer in the league's history, with 83 at the end of 2025-26. Parris was City's earlier leader. Joining in 2014, City are not founder members, but they have been in the division continuously since.
Birmingham City and Everton. Founder members who have each spent time outside the top flight. Birmingham produced the first Golden Boot winner, Rachel Williams, and two more in Carney and White. Everton were Parris's first WSL club.
Liverpool. Natasha Dowie's 13 goals in 2013 made her the Golden Boot winner in the season Liverpool took their first title. Liverpool were relegated in 2020, which interrupted any long-term club scoring record.
For the full list of title-winners these scorers played for, see our WSL winners list.
Before the WSL: the scorers of the National Division
English women's football had a national top flight for twenty years before the WSL began. The Women's Football Association founded the National League in 1991, and the FA took it over and renamed it the Premier League National Division from 1994-95. Arsenal won twelve titles in it, and Croydon and Doncaster Belles took most of the rest.
Its scorers sit outside the WSL record books entirely. That is a decision about divisions, not quality. Kelly Smith scored heavily for Arsenal in more than one spell and Karen Walker was a prolific striker for Doncaster Belles in the 1990s, but their league goals were scored in a different competition, under different organisers, mostly by amateurs and semi-professionals, and with records kept by clubs and volunteers rather than a league office.
There is no reliable, complete list of National Division scorers. Season totals survive patchily in newspaper reports and club histories. That gap is why no attempt has been made to merge the two eras into one all-time list, and why it would be misleading to do so with the records that exist.
The arrival of professional contracts changed what a striker's total meant. Before full-time training became the norm in the top division, a forward's numbers depended heavily on the club she joined and the opposition it faced. Our guide to when women's football became professional in England traces that change. The structure of the modern league these players score in is laid out in the Women's Super League guide, and England's place in Europe, where the leading WSL strikers now spend their midweeks, is covered in our explanation of how WSL clubs reach the Champions League. For more of our coverage of the English game, start from the football section.