Scoring every season: the longest runs

Giggs kept the run going with very little to spare. His best return was 13 in 1993/94, and he never reached a dozen again; the following season he managed one goal in 29 games, and that single strike is all that stops the run breaking in its third year. In five of its last eight seasons he scored exactly twice. The streak was built from a winger's steady trickle rather than a forward's haul, which is why it survived his move into central midfield in his thirties.

Gary Speed is the other name whose run starts in the very first Premier League season. His sixteen, from 1992/93 to 2007/08, covered Leeds, Everton, Newcastle and Bolton without a blank year, and that is the harder way to do it, since every move means winning a place all over again in front of a new manager and a new crowd.

Wayne Rooney also managed sixteen, from 2002/03 to 2017/18, and his run covers every Premier League season he played, from the teenager at Everton to the returning veteran at the same club fifteen years later. Steven Gerrard has sixteen as well, from 1999/00 to 2014/15, all for Liverpool.

Danny Welbeck is the live case. His run began in 2010/11 and was still going at the end of 2025/26, sixteen seasons later, outlasting spells at Sunderland, Manchester United, Arsenal, Watford and Brighton. It is a far quieter career than Giggs's, but on this measure he is closing in on the men above him.

What separates the top runs from the rest is often the start. Giggs, Speed and Rooney scored in their very first season; Lampard, Defoe, Terry and Welbeck each had at least one blank year at the beginning before the run took hold, which is why the note column so often begins a season or two after the span. James Milner is the reverse case: his fifteen ran from his debut season at Leeds in 2002/03 to 2016/17, and he went on playing for nine more Premier League seasons after it ended.

Paul Scholes is second with nineteen, from 1994/95 to 2012/13, and the run takes in the strange coda of his career. He retired in 2011, came back in January 2012, and scored in both of the seasons he had supposedly given up. There is no blank anywhere in his record: every Premier League season Scholes played, he scored in.

Frank Lampard has eighteen, from 1997/98 to 2014/15, running from West Ham through Chelsea and finishing with his one season at Manchester City. His first two Premier League campaigns, as a teenager at Upton Park, were the only blanks.

Jermain Defoe has seventeen and Emile Heskey sixteen, and Heskey's presence is the most useful corrective on the page. He spent his career being told he did not score enough. He scored in every Premier League season from 1996/97 to 2011/12 across Leicester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Wigan and Aston Villa, and very few of the forwards who were preferred to him can say the same.

Sergio Ramos scored in every La Liga season from 2004/05 to 2020/21, seventeen in a row. Lionel Messi's run at Barcelona covers exactly the same seventeen seasons. A centre-back level with the greatest scorer the league has seen, on any measure at all, is the best single fact on the page.

John Terry also reached seventeen, from 2000/01 to 2016/17, all for Chelsea, and Mats Hummels has sixteen in the Bundesliga between 2008/09 and 2023/24 for Dortmund and Bayern. All three did it the same way: corners, free kicks, a reliable leap and, in Ramos's case, a willingness to take penalties.

A centre-back who scores three times a season is not prolific, but he is remarkably hard to keep off the scoresheet for a whole year. Set pieces arrive every match regardless of how the team is playing, and a defender's chances do not dry up when the forwards lose form. That is why these three runs are as long as most of the attackers' around them.

Messi's run, for its part, never actually broke. It stopped because he left for Paris in 2021, not because a season passed without a goal. Antoine Griezmann's sixteen are the same kind of record, covering every La Liga season he played between 2010/11 and 2025/26 at Real Sociedad, Atlético Madrid and Barcelona.

Fabio Quagliarella's eighteen, from 2005/06 to 2022/23, is the longest outside England, and it has an odd shape. It began after three seasons away from Serie A early in his career, ran through Ascoli, Sampdoria, Udinese, Napoli, Juventus, Torino and Sampdoria again, and lasted until he retired. Francesco Totti has seventeen, every season from 2000/01 to the end of his Roma career in 2016/17, and Alberto Gilardino sixteen across a long list of clubs. Totti's run leaves no gaps at all: Roma's captain scored in every season he played this century, including the last, when he came off the bench more often than he started.

For Career Path, that Italian timeline is the classic hard round: crest after crest from Serie A, nothing especially glamorous until Juventus turns up in the middle. The instinct is to guess a journeyman, and this table is the correction. A player who kept scoring for eighteen straight seasons was wanted wherever he went, so a long, wandering path through Italian clubs in that era is as likely to belong to a forward as to a squad defender, and the clubs in the middle of the timeline are where to start guessing.

Thomas Müller's sixteen and Aritz Aduriz's fifteen round out the continental contribution. Aduriz's run, at Athletic Club for most of it, ended in 2019/20, the last season he played.