THE TRENDLINE Premier League
The Trendline · Premier League · careers since 1888-89

Compare Players

Two English top-flight careers on one chart · legends included
What this page doesPut any two English top-flight careers on the same chart — a current Premier League player against a legend, or two of either — and see how their league goals stacked up season by season and at the same age. Flip to era-adjusted to read every season at today's scoring rate, because a goal in a 3.5-goals-a-game league is not the same as a goal in a 2.7 one. Every number comes from the players' published career tables; nothing is estimated.
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Pick The Debate

Start from a classic pairing, or type any two names — every current Premier League outfield player with a goal, an assist or a full season behind him, plus a set of all-time greats flagged in gold. Change player or Remove swaps either side out at any time; an empty box takes a new name.

Loading the career data…

01

Goals Per Appearance, By Age

League goals per appearance for each season, plotted at the player's age that season. Seasons under 10 appearances are left off this chart — a one-goal, one-appearance cameo is not a rate.

Scoring era
age = age on 1 August of the season's start year

02

League Goals, Season By Season

Cumulative English top-flight league goals by career season — season 1 is each player's first top-flight season, so a debut arc lines up against a legend's. Hollow dots are seasons under 10 appearances.

Scoring era
hover any dot for the season, club and line · hollow = under 10 appearances

03

Season By Season

Every English top-flight season for both players, as published. Assists exist only for seasons the Fantasy Premier League API covers; a dash means the source does not publish the figure, not zero.

04

The Era Chart

This is what the era adjustment reads from: league-wide goals per match for every English top-flight season since 1888-89. A 1920s goal was scored into a far higher-scoring league than a 2020s goal; the toggle above rescales every season to the latest completed season's rate. The red point is this season, so far.

Where this season sitsLoading the era data…
hover any season · red = this season so far

Seasons with no value (wartime gaps, or seasons the source lacks) leave a gap rather than a guess. engsoccerdata tier-1 rows through 2024-25; 2025-26 from the football-data.co.uk mirror; 2026-27 in progress from openfootball and the FPL API.

How this works. Each line is one player's English top-flight league career — Premier League seasons, and First Division seasons up to 1991-92 (from 1992-93 the "First Division" was the second tier and is excluded). Cup goals never count. Career histories come from each player's Wikipedia "Career statistics" table, read through the MediaWiki API and cached verbatim; the pages used are listed below (text under CC BY-SA 4.0). For current players the in-progress season comes from the official Fantasy Premier League API instead: goals and assists as published, appearances counted as gameweeks with at least a minute played — those rows are marked FPL in the tables. A season split between two top-flight clubs is summed.

Era-adjusted rescales every season to scoring: adjusted goals = goals × ( ÷ that season's league-wide goals per match — the era chart below), where is the league average in , the latest completed season, from the site's era table. It is a league-average translation — it says how much the whole league scored, not how the top scorers did — so read it as a fair comparison between eras rather than a precise one. Nothing is interpolated: a season with no league average would simply have no adjusted value.

Assists are not available for legends. Only the FPL API publishes assists (2006-07 at the earliest), so pre-FPL seasons show a dash rather than a zero. Age is the player's age on 1 August of the season's start year, from the date of birth on the Wikipedia infobox; a player with no published date of birth is left off the age chart and the page says so. Players whose Wikipedia table could not be read, or whose page could not be verified against their FPL club, are left out rather than guessed — the build report lists them.

Wikipedia pages used ()