Read some thing today that i couldnt help agree with. Shearer isnt the top flight top scorer. Hes the prem top scorer.
The real title goes to jimmy greaves. 347 top flight goals.
That’s a remarkable feat for Greavsie. With Haaland’s extended stay, I want to be here to witness Haaland overtaking him.
I love Jimmy Greaves but he barely played the same sport. He played in an era that averaged 4 goals a game, compared to 2.7 now which makes comparing them like for like impossible and kinda irrelevant.
Goals were cheaper and less important because there were almost twice as many.
If the point of comparing goal scoring numbers is to judge how good and how dominant a goal scorer someone is then you have to account for that. In his 41 goal season in 1961, Greaves scored 2.4% of the total goals scored in the league that year.
In 20/21 (the season Haaland scored 36) that would be 25 goals.
Or if you wanted to go the other way, Haaland scoring 3.3% of the total goals like he did in his first season would be the equivalent of scoring 59 in 1961.
Same thing with Dixie Deans 61 goal season. It’s not a coincidence that of the 20 top individual goals scoring seasons in English football history that 14 of them were int he 20s and 30s. The best strikers back then weren’t better than the best goalscorers now, they just played in an era when everyone scored a lot more goals.
More generally that’s why drawing a line at 1992 for statistics is useful. A few years either side of 92, a bunch of things happened that add up to the start of the modern game. The offside law came in, back pass law changed the number of goals scored considerably, 3 subs brought in big tactical changes, and the group format European cup established the 60ish game calendar we have today. Maybe most importantly the old foreign player quotients were removed, so the quality of players went up considerably now teams were hiring from all over the world and not just the UK plus 3. The Bosman ruling amplified that again in 95.
So you can just about compare what Shearer and co were doing in the early 90s to what Haaland is doing today. Goals were worth about the same as they are today (2.65/game in 1992 vs 2.7 in 2022) you can’t compare Haaland to Greaves or Dean unless you remove absolutely all context and strip away any meaning from what those accomplishments meant compared to the players around him.