Since the formation of the Football League in 1888, just 38 players have reached the remarkable milestone of plundering 40 English league goals in a single season. As FourFourTwo goes to press, Erling Haaland is bidding to become No.39, which would make him – incredibly – only the third person in the past 50 years to achieve the spectacular feat.
What’s more, neither of those two most recent goal-getters did it at the top level. Haaland, just 22 and in his debut season in the league, would be only the second player since the Second World War to register 40-plus efforts in an English top-flight campaign. Even true greats such as Gary Lineker and Thierry Henry never managed more than 30, and the modern-day Premier League record is shared by Andy Cole and Alan Shearer with ‘just’ 34 (Mohamed Salah’s 32 being the most in the 38-game era post-1995).
The list of those who did shatter the 40-goal barrier has legendary figures rubbing shoulders with lower-division heroes barely known beyond a 30-mile radius of their home grounds. Each one is special, from the first (Jimmy Cookson in the 1925-26 Division Three North, the Chesterfield centre-forward smashing No.40 just before Blackburn’s Ted Harper did likewise up in Division One) to the last (Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic in 2021-22).
The timing of Cookson and Harper’s 40+ campaigns was not coincidental. The impetus for goal-scoring sparked in the summer of 1925 with a revision to Law 11 in the Laws of the Game: the offside rule. Prior to that, there always had to be three defenders between the attacker and the goal when the ball was played to them. This regulation was ruthlessly exploited by defenders after the First World War; most notably, Bill McCracken, a Northern Irish full-back with Newcastle, perfected an offside trap that snared forwards like a web catching flies. Countless defences soon copied his example. Goals dwindled, attendances dropped, football authorities panicked and the new law – just two defenders between attacker and goal – came into force for the 1925-26 season.
The change was instant and dramatic. Goals in the English top flight increased from 1,192 in 1924-25 to 1,703 a season later; from an average of 2.58 per match to a crowd-swelling 3.89. Until then, the largest haul in an English league season had been 39 goals by Darlington’s David Brown, of Scotland. Such totals suddenly became commonplace in the period.
The 40-goal-season strikers had arrived.
DIXIE DEAN
William ‘Dixie’ Dean was the epitome of
