The players who scored in all four of Europe's big leagues

There is a genuine paradox at the heart of this list. Collecting goals in four leagues requires a player good enough that four different clubs in four countries wanted him — and simultaneously not so good that any of them refused to sell. That is a narrow band, and it sits some way below the very top of the game.

The players who occupy it tend to share a profile: they arrived somewhere young with a huge reputation, did not quite become what was predicted, and spent their late twenties as a high-quality, reasonably priced option that ambitious clubs across Europe kept taking a chance on. Each move looked like a fresh start; the aggregate is a passport full of stamps.

There is no failure in that. A player who scored in all four of these leagues has done something no more than a handful of footballers in history have managed, and most of the legends who were supposed to be on this list are not.

The most revealing part of each row is not the total but the distribution. Some of these careers are near-balanced across the four, which indicates a player who genuinely established himself everywhere he went. Others are heavily weighted to one league with token returns in the other three — one very good spell and three that did not work out.

Both are legitimate ways onto the list and they describe completely different careers. It is worth reading the splits before forming an opinion about any name here, because the total on its own flattens the two together.

The data cut-off matters here too: the three continental leagues start in 2000/01, so a player whose Italian or Spanish goals came in the nineties has part of his case invisible. Anyone building an argument from this table should check the seasons before making it.

For anyone who plays Career Path, this list is gold. A player who scored in four leagues has a club sequence that crosses four countries, which means the reveals go somewhere genuinely unexpected every two or three steps — and the sequence is long enough to stay difficult deep into a round.

It also illustrates the game's central skill. When a career jumps countries repeatedly, stop trying to recall the player and start reading the route. A move from England to Italy in a player's mid-twenties has a different meaning from a move the other way; a Spanish club buying from Germany in the mid-2010s narrows the field considerably.

Get good at reading routes and these careers become the most gettable rather than the hardest, which is a very satisfying reversal to earn.

The data cut-off deserves one more mention here because it bites harder on this table than on any other. Three of the four leagues begin in 2000/01, which means a player who scored in Italy in 1997 and in England in 2003 appears as a one-league scorer. Several genuine members of this club are therefore missing, and the list should be read as the players who managed it within the window rather than in history.

The Premier League's longer window cuts the other way and is worth holding in mind when you read the totals: an English portion of a career may be fully counted while the Italian or Spanish portion of the same career is half missing, which flatters the England-weighted rows. That is not a reason to distrust the table, only to read the splits as a floor rather than a final figure.

That limitation aside, the group is small enough to be worth learning outright. A couple of dozen names covers it, and because these are precisely the careers that cross borders repeatedly, knowing them pays off across Career Path, Top 10 nationality boards and any question that starts with the phrase "which player has played for clubs in".