Manchester City striker Erling Haaland has been lighting up the Premier League ever since signing from Borussia Dortmund in 2022.
The striker has won two league titles, the FA Cup and the UEFA Champions League under Pep Guardiola, all while obliterating goal-scoring records.
The tally he managed in 2022/23, when City won a famous treble, stands alone as the single greatest scoring season in the history of the Premier League.
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Record for most goals in Premier League season
Erling Haaland holds the record for most goals in a single Premier League season, having scored 36 times in the 2022/23 season.
Prior to Haaland’s arrival at Man City, there was some debate as to which record truly stands as the Premier League goal-scoring bar for a single season, and the questions are centered around the format of play.
Upon the Premier League’s inception in 1992, the league boasted 22 teams in the English top flight. That means a league season consisted of 42 matches.
After the first three Premier League seasons, the league was reduced to 20 teams for the 1995/96 campaign, dropping the season schedule to 38 matches, meaning fewer chances to score goals.
Yet Haaland topped them both, putting any debate about which is the real number to bed. He accomplished this feat with five matches to spare, obliterating the previous marks with one of the best Premier League seasons we’ve ever seen.
Premier League goal scoring record for a 42-game season
For the first three years of the Premier League’s existence, 22 teams contested a 42-match league campaign.
Teddy Sheringham scored 22 goals to lead the league in the first season of the Premier League’s existence, but that would soon be blown out of the water.
The next season, in 1993/94, Andy Cole of Newcastle United scored 34 goals, which sat as the Premier League record for goals in a season for nearly 30 years. It was equalled the following campaign, in 1994/95, by Alan Shearer of Blackburn Rovers. But both of those marks happened in a 42-match season.
On April 30, 2023, Erling Haaland’s third-minute penalty against Fulham saw him equal this mark, and he broke the record against West Ham next time out on May 3 scoring goal number 35 still with five games to spare.
Premier League goal scoring record for a 38-game season
The heights reached by Cole and Shearer had yet to be reached since the Premier League cut down to 20 teams and therefore 38 games. Then Erling Haaland showed up.
With seven matches still remaining, Erling Haaland of Manchester City set the record for most goals in a 38-game season, grabbing his 33rd goal of the campaign against Arsenal on April 26. He ended the campaign with 36 goals.
The previous best tally for a 38-game season was set by Mohamed Salah of Liverpool, who reached 32 goals in the 2017/18 season, coming just two short of tying the record set by Cole and Shearer.
What is the record for most goals in an English league season?
While the above marks are all in the Premier League era, Haaland has a very long way to go to top the all-time goal scoring record, when including the decades of play during the period when it was known as the First Division.
In fact, the all-time English top flight goal scoring record is considered by many to be untouchable given the way the modern game has changed, making previous heights seemingly unattainable.
In the 1927/28 English First Division season, Dixie Dean of Everton, just 21 years old at the time, scored a whopping 60 goals, a mark that still stands alone today.
That total helped Dean en route to collecting 310 career top-flight goals, third-most all-time in English league history.
Even crazier: Dean scored 85 total goals through the 1928 calendar year (parts of both 1927/28 and 1928/29 seasons), helping Everton to the 1927/28 First Division title.
