Goals per 90 in England and Spain: what changes when you remove two players

Ronaldo is twentieth in the Premier League table, on 0.53 from 103 goals in 17,515 minutes. In La Liga he is first, on 1.12 from 311 goals in 25,082 minutes. On the face of it he more than doubled his scoring rate by changing country.

The English number averages three different players. Ronaldo arrived at Manchester United in 2003 aged 18 as a winger, and scored few goals in his first three seasons. By 2007/08 he was the league's top scorer with 31. Then, after nine years in Spain and three in Italy, he came back in 2021 in his late thirties. Average all of that together and you get 0.53. The Ronaldo who joined Real Madrid in 2009 was the 2007/08 version, at 24, and he stayed at that level or above it for nine years.

Luis Suárez shows a smaller version of the same thing. He averaged 0.65 at Liverpool between 2010/11 and 2013/14 and 0.79 in Spain afterwards, at Barcelona and then Atlético Madrid. Part of that is a better team. Part of it is that his Liverpool numbers include his first half-season in England, while his Spanish ones start with him already at his peak.

Haaland's 112 goals in 11,010 minutes give him 0.92, clear of Sergio Agüero on 0.84. But 11,010 minutes is only just over the floor, about 122 full games. Agüero's 0.84 comes from 19,771 minutes, nearly twice as many, which makes it the more remarkable number for now. Whether Haaland can hold 0.9 for another five seasons is the open question in this table.

Below them, Thierry Henry (0.74) and Harry Kane (0.71) are the two who sustained a high rate over a very long sample, 21,301 and 26,909 minutes. Kane's 213 goals in that time are the most of anyone in the top ten. Alan Shearer, ninth on 0.61, has the longest sample in the table by far: 38,215 minutes and 260 goals, still the Premier League record. Nobody else in the twenty kept scoring at that level for as long.

Kane's row stops in 2022/23 because he left for Bayern Munich, where the single-season table on this site shows him scoring 36 Bundesliga goals in 2023/24 and again in 2025/26. A league's rate table cannot follow a player abroad. It records a spell in one country, which is why Ronaldo can be twentieth in one and first in another without either number being wrong.

Ole Gunnar Solskjær's 0.59 is the case for reading rates carefully. He spent much of his Manchester United career as a substitute, and a forward who comes on with twenty minutes left against tired defenders scores at a higher rate than he would over ninety. His 91 goals in 13,940 minutes are a real record, but not quite the same kind as Michael Owen's 150 in 23,034.

Take Ronaldo and Messi out of the La Liga table and the third name, Gonzalo Higuaín, is on 0.81, below both Haaland and Agüero. Luis Suárez on 0.79, Robert Lewandowski and the Brazilian Ronaldo on 0.75, and Karim Benzema on 0.67 complete the top eight, and those numbers look a lot like the top of the English table.

So the gap between the two leagues is really the gap made by two players. Messi's 474 goals in 42,087 minutes are the volume record and the rate record at once; nobody else in either table has more than 311 goals, and only Ronaldo comes within two hundred of him. Ronaldo's 311 in 25,082 are the higher rate. For nine seasons they were in the same league, pushing each other's totals up, and La Liga's per-90 table is the trace that rivalry left.

Lewandowski's row is the most surprising. His 0.75 is from 2022/23 to 2025/26, his seasons at Barcelona, which began when he was 33. Most strikers on these tables did their best scoring in their mid-twenties. Lewandowski produced a top-five La Liga rate in his mid-thirties, after a decade of scoring even more in Germany.

Further down are the names that make this a good board to play. Diego Tristán's 0.61 at Deportivo La Coruña, Luís Fabiano's 0.64 at Sevilla and Ricardo Oliveira's 0.56 come from the early 2000s, when Spanish football had more strong sides outside Madrid and Barcelona. Cristhian Stuani's 0.56, mostly for Girona and still going in his late thirties, is a reminder that the table is not only for stars.

On a per-90 board, career totals mislead. Shearer and Messi are obvious, but the top of each table belongs to players with short, intense spells: Haaland, Ruud van Nistelrooy (0.70 in five United seasons), Higuaín, the Brazilian Ronaldo. Think of the striker who was briefly unstoppable rather than the one who lasted, and you will find more of them. The long careers are the answers everyone else will already have typed.