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Opinion

Premier League get this spectacularly wrong – Highest scoring player at club in maiden season’

2 years ago
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The Premier League have put out a pretty strange stat overnight.

The stat published by their official Twitter account.

That official Premier League tweet declaring ‘Ivan Toney has 12 Premier League goals for Brentford FC
this season. Two more goals would make him the highest-scoring player for a club in their maiden Premier League season.’

I kept reading this over and over again to try and make sense of it but I am still struggling as to their logic.

So what they are saying is that the first (maiden) time that any club has played a year in the Premier League, the most goals scored by a player at such a club is 13 goals, in their opening PL campaign…

Well, the Premier League as a new entity / branding kicked off with the 1992/93 season and of course that meant all 22 clubs were in their ‘maiden Premier League season’, a quick look shows 13 players scored at least 15 goals that season for starters, Teddy Sheringham at the very top with 22. Sir Les was second that season with 20 for QPR, a 30 year old Micky Quinn (after Kevin Keegan sold him for £250,000 on 20 November 1992) fourth with 17 for Coventry, whilst Alan Shearer was joint fifth with 16 goals after his record breaking move to Blackburn, although he was out half the season after an ACL injury restricted him to 20 games.

The second Premier League season saw Newcastle United newly promoted and taking the Premier League by storm, finishing fifth. Andy Cole scoring an astonishing 34 goals for NUFC in their maiden PL season, all credit to Ivan Toney for a decent season this time, BUT 12 (or 14) goals doesn’t even scrape the surface when compared to the Newcastle striker in that 1993/94 season.

Alan Shearer got 31 that season for Blackburn to finish second top to Andy Cole in the Premier League goalscorers list but in sixth was Peter Beardsley, as well as laying on so many of Cole’s goals, he scored 20 himself in Newcastle’s maiden PL season.

To nobody’s surprise, not a single player has ever come remotely close to matching Andy Cole’s 34 goals when playing for a club in their maiden Premier League season.

Indeed, whilst in 1994/95 a certain Alan Shearer scored 34 goals for Blackburn to match Andy Cole’s NUFC feat in terms of the overall highest number of goals in a Premier League season by any striker (not just in a club’s maiden PL season), no other player has matched those 34 goal totals (scored when there were 42 Premier League matches in a season) in the next near three decades. This season Mo Salah tops the PL goalscoring charts with 22 goals and only four games left to play for Liverpool.

The Premier League tweet in question was posted at 3am this (Saturday) morning, maybe a PL employee out on the lash and deciding to do a bit of unpaid overtime by putting out a quirky Premier League stat. He / she will have some hangover when they revisit that tweet / stat this morning.

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