Erling Haaland is undoubtedly one of English football’s greatest goalscorers, with his feats and achievements since joining Manchester City unparalleled in the Premier League era.
In 167 games the Norwegian has scored 145 times in all competitions for City, including 11 hat-tricks (featuring two five-goal hauls) and scoring more than once in a match on 36 occasions.
The 25-year-old struck his 100th goal in the Premier League last week against Fulham, reaching the landmark in just 111 appearances — 13 fewer than Alan Shearer’s previous record of 124.
Of course, the Premier League only began in 1992 when the top flight — which started in 1888 — was rebranded. So how does Haaland compare to the very greatest strikers across the entire history of the game in England? Is he better than inter-war goal machine Dixie Dean? Or how about Jimmy Greaves, a prolific scorer in the 1950s and 1960s? And how many could Haaland end up with if he plays in the country for the rest of his career?
The Athletic takes a dive into footballing history to find out.
Comparing players from different eras is fraught with difficulty. It is no exception when it comes to strikers, not least because of the fluctuation in the goals-per-game rate over the English top flight’s 137-year existence.
However, something that has never changed is that putting the ball in the back of the net is the most important part of the sport, so it is perfectly understandable — even natural — to weigh up and contrast those who have been the best at doing so.
The introduction of more and more competitions over the years has provided players with greater opportunities to score, so for the purposes of this article we will only look at data from the English top division.
So, firstly, here are the 10 all-time top scorers in the country’s top flight — with Haaland needing to net another 147 times to join this list and 258 more times to surpass Jimmy Greaves in the number one spot.
Greaves, who played for Chelsea (124 top-flight goals), Tottenham Hotspur (220) and West Ham United (13) in the English top division made his final appearance in it aged only 31.
Nat Lofthouse, who spent his entire career at Bolton Wanderers, and Alan Shearer, who represented Southampton, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United in the top flight, are the only other men in the top 10 apart from Greaves who played in the English top tier after the Second World War (the league was suspended during the conflict).
Meanwhile, fourth-placed Gordon Hodgson’s competitive playing days ended as a result of the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 — though it is unlikely, but by no means impossible, the then-35-year-old would have ended up scoring more than Greaves’ 357. Hodgson does have the distinction of being Liverpool’s highest scorer in the top flight, with 233 goals (he also got four for Aston Villa and 51 for Leeds United).
Charlie Buchan, who played for Sunderland and Arsenal and is in sixth, lost four seasons as a result of the First World War before resuming his top-flight career and scoring a total of 100 goals in the first four league campaigns that came after the conflict. Had the war not happened and had Buchan scored at the same rate during those four lost seasons, he would have finished with 358 goals — one more than Greaves.
All of the top 10 apart from Scotsman Hughie Gallacher played international football for England (Hodgson also played for South Africa).
Now, let’s take a more detailed look at both Greaves and, firstly, Dean and explore how Haaland compares to two men widely regarded as among the greatest goalscorers in history.
Dean’s average of 0.86 goals per game is the best of the top 10, and, until last week, was the second best among all players to have scored 100 times or more in the English top flight; behind only Jack Southworth, who scored 133 goals in 139 games for Blackburn and Everton from 1888 to 1894.
The prolific Dixie Dean, pictured in 1928 (H. F. Davis/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
However, Haaland joined the century club when he beat Bernd Leno at Craven Cottage and his current average of 0.89 goals per game is superior to Dean’s (but not Southworth’s 0.96, which was set in the first seven seasons of league football in England).
Yet Dean, who spent his entire top-flight career at Everton, did get to the 100-goal mark seven games quicker than Haaland — with the Englishman reaching three figures in just 104 matches after netting twice against Derby County on March 24, 1928 at the age of 21. This is also faster than Southworth, who took 112 matches.
The double against Derby was part of what must rank as one of football’s greatest feats, with Dean scoring an astonishing 60 goals in that 1927-28 season. Nobody else, before or since, has even hit 50 in an English top-flight campaign.
Here are the 10 highest-scoring seasons by a player in England’s top division, with Dean the only man to appear twice on the list and Greaves the sole individual to hit the 40-goal mark since the Second World War.
The most Haaland has scored in a league season in England is 36, doing so in his debut campaign in 2022-23, and even if he continues the 2025-26 season at the same impressive rate (15 goals in 15 league games), and plays every match, he will still fall 22 short of Dean’s mark of 60.
Here is how Dean reached that barely-believable figure in 1927-28, with his Everton team, unsurprisingly, winning the title.
Incredibly, his total comprised just one penalty and, what’s more, it was the 59th and penultimate goal — Dean netting from the spot on the final day against Arsenal on his way to his seventh hat-trick of the league campaign. For context, Haaland scored seven penalties in that 2022-23 Premier League season.
Those seven Dean hat-tricks are part of his record 30 in the English top division, with Haaland needing another 23 to eclipse this.
All 310 of Dean’s top-flight goals came for Everton — the most anyone has scored for one club in England’s elite division. Haaland needs another 211 in the Premier League for Manchester City to supplant Dean on this particular list.
Dean played his 362nd and final top-flight game at the age of just 30, failing to find the net against Birmingham City on December 11, 1937 before leaving Everton for third-tier Notts County.
One of his seasons at Everton — 1930-31 — was spent in the second tier following the club’s relegation, with the 39 league goals he scored therefore not counting towards his top-flight total.
Yet despite Dean’s remarkable achievements, he does not hold the record for the most goals in England’s top flight — that honour belongs to Greaves.
Nobody has come close to threatening the Englishman’s mark of 357 since his final top-flight game in 1971 and at the age Haaland is now (25 years and 144 days old) Greaves had already scored an eye-watering 246 goals in England’s elite division (146 more than the Norwegian).
Haaland, of course, plied his trade outside of England for several years before making his Premier League debut aged 22; Greaves was playing — and scoring — in the country’s top flight at 17. So a better way, for now, to compare their respective paths is by looking at how quickly they reached 100 goals.
And while Dean may have hit three figures quicker than Haaland, Greaves did not — getting there in 133 matches (22 more than the Norwegian needed). Greaves brought up his century of goals on November 19, 1960 with a hat-trick for Chelsea against Haaland’s future club Manchester City.
Jimmy Greaves at Stamford Bridge in 1957 (Don Morley/Allsport/Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
Yet clearly Haaland still has an awful lot to do if he is to break Greaves’ record. His current contract at Manchester City ends in the summer of 2034, so if he does leave the Premier League then, he has nine more seasons (including this one) and will need to average 29 league goals a campaign to overhaul Greaves, who died in 2021. In his three completed seasons so far, Haaland has netted 36, 27 and 22 times in the Premier League at an average of 28.
Now, here is the breakdown of Greaves’ English top-flight goals by season; with the forward scoring at least 20 in each of his first eight campaigns.
Following his most prolific season in 1960-61, Greaves left Chelsea and joined Italian club Milan. However, he struggled to adapt to living abroad and joined Tottenham back in England that December — scoring a hat-trick on debut against Blackpool.
Typically, Greaves still scored nine times in 10 Serie A games for Milan and his total of 366 goals in Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues remained a record until Cristiano Ronaldo surpassed him in 2017.
But was it easier for players to score in the past? Would Dean’s 60-goal season and Greaves’ remarkable consistency be far harder to achieve in the modern era, with all else being the same?
While it is impossible to truly ascertain the difficulties faced by forwards in bygone years, the goals-per-game average across the English top flight’s history can give us some clues.
Other than the first few seasons in the late 1880s and early 1890s, the highest the average has been is in the second half of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s — Dean’s prime years.
And it is no big secret why.
The change in the offside law in 1925 — which stipulated that two players would need to be between an attacker and the goal line for the attacker to remain onside, not the three it had been previously — immediately ushered in a higher-scoring era as defences struggled to adapt, and it is not a coincidence that nine of the highest 10 individual goals totals in an English top-flight season (see the table above) were achieved from 1925-26 to 1935-36.
This in no way cheapens Dean’s career and his remarkable 60-goal haul, nor indeed any of the impressive scoring by players in the period; but it does provide context as to why these goal tallies from nearly 100 years ago have remained almost exclusively out of reach ever since.
Furthermore, each team played 42 games in every top-flight season from 1919-20 to 1986-87, as opposed to the 38 we are used to now; therefore players had more league matches in which to score.
Greaves also operated in a higher-scoring era, with the average number of goals per game in the English top division being three or more in 11 of his 14 seasons playing in it. Since the last of those 11 campaigns (1967-68) only once has the average been above three: in 2023-24 (3.28), when Haaland was the top scorer with 27.
Obviously the prowess of players like Dean and Greaves (and Haaland) has its own impact on the goals-per-game average, but not to the extent where whole trends can be explained solely by their individual outputs.
Yet none of this is to say that it is definitively harder for Haaland and other current Premier League forwards to score, and therefore that the Norwegian must be seen as a better marksman than anyone who has come before him in the English club game.
Rather it is to point out the varying conditions and circumstances in which individuals have played throughout the years. You could ask, for example, how many more goals would those names of the past have scored if the number of penalties awarded today was as high back then?
There is no right or wrong answer, and that is partly what makes discussions about the greatest players and athletes in the history of various sports so hotly contested and, above all, fun.
Only time, and perhaps injuries (or a lack of them), will tell if Haaland breaks Greaves’ mark of 357 goals. As for Dean’s 60 in a season? Well, that is one record that might just last forever.