Premier League top scorers of the 2000s

Ten seasons, 2000/01 to 2009/10, and one forward a long way clear: Thierry Henry's 157 is forty-five more than anybody else managed in the decade, and he had left for Barcelona with three seasons of it still to play.

Below him the table is a fair picture of the years when four clubs pulled away from the rest. It is also, quietly, the decade in which a midfielder finished second on the scoring charts, which had not happened before and has not happened since.

Frank Lampard's 112 goals from midfield is the entry that most people misremember, usually downward. Six of the twenty stayed at one club for the whole decade, among them Henry, van Nistelrooy and Drogba — a much higher proportion than the nineties list, and a direct consequence of the money that had arrived at the top of the league.

The bottom half is where the decade actually lives. Names like Viduka, Beattie, Yakubu and Bent were the strikers a mid-table club was built around, scoring twelve to eighteen a season for teams that finished eighth, and there is no equivalent tier in the league now.