Every Premier League club's appearance record holder

Ryan Giggs's 632 Premier League appearances for Manchester United is the largest number on this page by more than a hundred, and the size of it is easier to grasp as a share. United have played 1,304 league matches across their 34 seasons, and Giggs appeared in 48 per cent of them. He was in the side for the first season of the competition and was still being picked twenty-odd years later.

The rest of United's list shows how unusual that is even at a club famous for keeping its own. Paul Scholes, second, finished on 499; David de Gea made 415 and Gary Neville 400. Those are huge careers by any standard, and the gap between the best of them and Giggs is still well over a hundred matches.

No other record on the page is within shouting distance. A player would need to be a regular at one club from his late teens to his late thirties, through several managers and every squad rebuild, to get there. The modern game, with bigger squads and more rotation, makes that harder every year.

The next three records belong to the archetypal one-badge players of their clubs. At Liverpool it is closer than most people realise: Jamie Carragher made 508 appearances and Steven Gerrard 504, four short. Carragher's record is one of the narrowest margins at the top of any club's list, and it rests on a defender being slightly more available than a captain who carried the side for a decade.

John Terry's 492 for Chelsea is the clearer case. Frank Lampard is next on 429, with César Azpilicueta on 349 and Petr Čech on 333 further back. Terry was a fixture for most of the period in which Chelsea went from a cup side to a title-winning one, and his total reflects how rarely the club looked elsewhere at centre-back.

Mark Noble's 414 for West Ham is the one that stands apart from its own club. The next man, Aaron Cresswell, has 312, so Noble leads by more than a hundred matches, a bigger margin than at Liverpool or Chelsea. For a club that spent a season in the Championship in the middle of his career, that is a lot of football to have given one shirt.

Arsenal's record holder is Ray Parlour, on 333. Not Tony Adams, not Thierry Henry, not Patrick Vieira, and nobody from the current side. Parlour was a dependable presence on the right of midfield from the early nineties until 2004, and the men behind him are tightly bunched: David Seaman on 325, Dennis Bergkamp on 315, Martin Keown on 310.

The explanation is mostly about when careers started. Adams, Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn played much of their best football before 1992, and none of that is counted here. The great sides of the Wenger years were built around players who arrived from elsewhere and moved on before they could pile up the numbers. The squads since have been rebuilt too often for anyone to stay long.

Measured against what was available, it is the thinnest record of any club. Arsenal have played 1,304 league matches in this division, and Parlour featured in about a quarter of them. Every other club that has been ever-present has a record holder with a higher share than that.

Dividing each record by the matches a club has played since 1992/93 gives a fairer comparison than raw totals. Arsenal are lowest, and close behind are Tottenham, where Hugo Lloris has 361, and Manchester City, where David Silva's 309 is only five ahead of Bernardo Silva. Both records represent about 28 per cent of their club's fixtures. Everton, with Séamus Coleman on 374, are only a percentage point higher.

Two mid-sized clubs belong in the same bracket. Sunderland have spent 17 seasons in the Premier League and their record is John O'Shea's 189; Fulham have had 19 and Brede Hangeland holds theirs on 217. Long stays, regular churn, nobody sticking around. Compare Stoke, where Ryan Shawcross played 317 of the club's 380 Premier League matches, or Bolton, where Jussi Jääskeläinen made 379 of 494. Brighton's Lewis Dunk is on 299 of 342 and still adding to it.

At the foot of the list sit the clubs whose stays were too brief for anyone to build a big number: Barnsley's record is 37, Blackpool's and Luton's 38. Those men played almost every match their clubs ever had in the division, which makes them, in one narrow sense, the most complete record holders on the page.

This matters in Higher or Lower, especially in linked mode, where the next card shares a club with the last. A club's record holder is not automatically the biggest career number to have passed through it: Parlour leads Arsenal, but plenty of men who spent a few years there and many more elsewhere finish above him on a whole-career appearance count. Knowing which clubs churn their squads tells you when the famous long-server is the safe call and when the journeyman beside him is the better bet.