The most common number of goals in a top-flight career is zero

Serie A sits at the top at 48.6 per cent: 2,054 of its 4,224 players this century never scored in it. The Scottish Premiership is next at 46.5, La Liga just behind at 46.3, then the Bundesliga at 43.9 and the Premier League last, a fraction lower and also shown as 43.9. The spread between the highest and the lowest is about five points. Whatever the style of football, roughly every second name on a top-flight squad list is someone who will leave without a goal to their name.

That gap is small enough to be interesting rather than dramatic. Italy's reputation for tight, low-scoring matches would predict a higher figure, and it gets one, but not by much. The bigger driver is how many players a league uses who barely play at all. A division that hands out lots of short debuts to teenagers and loan arrivals piles up zeros quickly, because a player cannot score in games he never gets on the pitch for.

The median for zero-scorers in the Premier League is eight appearances, and 1,237 of the 2,254 played fewer than ten games. So most of the blank careers are short ones. The headline number is less a story about defenders who never ventured forward than about how many people pass briefly through a top-flight squad.

Split the Premier League's zeros by listed position and the picture is more mixed than you might assume. Goalkeepers account for 372 of them, which is no surprise: almost every keeper in the competition's history has a blank, with only a handful of exceptions. Defenders supply 835, midfielders 610 and forwards 437.

That last figure deserves a second look. Of the 1,438 players listed as forwards, those 437 who never scored a Premier League goal are a little under a third. These are mostly brief careers: a striker signed in January who played six games off the bench, a youth-team forward given ten minutes on the final day. But they are forwards, and they are blank.

At the other extreme sits a small group who played for years and never scored. There are 117 Premier League careers of a hundred games or more with no goal in them, though only 30 of those belong to outfield players. That long-service end of the subject has a post of its own; the point here is simply that it is a tiny fraction of the 2,254.

After the 2,254 zeros and the 617 single goals, the Premier League thins out steadily: 807 players on two to four, 564 on five to nine, 748 on ten to forty-nine. Then the line falls off a cliff. Only 109 finished on fifty to ninety-nine, and just 35 have reached a hundred.

The concentration that produces is severe. The top tenth of Premier League players, by goals, have scored about two-thirds of every goal credited to a player in the competition. The top one per cent, about fifty men, scored close to a fifth of them on their own. Goals are not shared out across a squad in anything like the way minutes or appearances are.

The other four leagues tell the same story in slightly different proportions. In Serie A the top tenth of scorers account for over seventy per cent of the goals, the most lopsided of the five; in the Bundesliga it is just over sixty-three, the least. Everywhere, the curve looks like a ski jump: a huge pile at nought and one, a slope, and then a handful of names stretched out on their own.

Scotland is the extreme case at the top end. Only six players have reached a hundred Scottish Premiership goals in this period and 56 more finished between fifty and ninety-nine, while 2,403 of its players ended on nought or one. A small league with a few dominant clubs concentrates its scoring in very few hands.

The median goal total is one in all five leagues. That is the cleanest single statement of what a top-flight squad actually is: a small core who score, a larger group who contribute the odd goal from a set piece, and a long list of players whose careers there are measured in a few appearances.

It also changes how you should picture the typical player. He is not a regular starter with a respectable twenty goals. He is a squad member, often a young one, who got a handful of games and either scored once or did not score at all. The famous names are the rare exception, which is why they are famous.

This is the reasoning behind a good Higher or Lower call. When a player you only half recognise appears with his goals hidden, the honest prior is that the number is very small, and frequently zero. Most people anchor on what a proper striker scores and call higher out of habit. If the known card shows a modest total like five or six, the unknown squad player is more likely below it than above, and that single adjustment survives more pairs than a good memory for famous strikers does.

None of this makes the goalscorers less impressive. It makes them more so. Getting off the zero already puts a player ahead of nearly half of everyone who played in his league, and getting to fifty puts him in the top three per cent.