Premier League all-time top scorers

Alan Shearer scored his last Premier League goal in April 2006 and nobody has come close since. Twenty seasons later he is still forty-seven goals clear at the top of a list that every generation of forwards has had a go at, which is the sort of margin that stops being a record and starts being a landmark.

This is the full top twenty, counted from the competition's first season in 1992/93. It is the single most argued-about list in English football and the one most people get wrong somewhere between seventh and twelfth, because the names that live there are not the names that come to mind.

The shape of the list is the interesting part. Only five of the twenty scored all of their goals for a single club — Kane, Agüero, Henry, Vardy and Son — and everyone else moved at least once, which is why so many of these totals are assembled rather than accumulated. Andy Cole's 187 came at three different clubs, none of which most people would name first.

It is also a list that rewards staying put in a way that flatters nobody's highlight reel. Frank Lampard is seventh on 177 goals, scored over twenty Premier League seasons from midfield, and Jermain Defoe's 163 came across nineteen seasons and three clubs without him ever finishing a season as the league's top scorer. The forwards you would name first are not always the forwards at the top.