With some positions on the football pitch, it’s easy to quantify the output of a player. For a goalkeeper, it might be saves made and clean sheets kept. For a defender, how many tackles, blocks and interceptions they make. For attacking players, the objective is clear: be involved in goals, whether that’s creating them or scoring them. And, if you can do both… well, that’s all the merrier.
In that regard, few are better in the Premier League than Mo Salah, who has seemingly been drinking from the fountain of youth given that, at the age of 32 and 3/4, he’s on course to deliver the best season from a single player in EPL history. As of February 14, the Egyptian has had a hand in 36 of Liverpool’s 58 goals so far in the 2024/25 season; netting 22 and assisting 14 others. That’s a whopping 62% of the Reds’ entire goal output.
With plenty of games left to play, Salah is on the verge of breaking the all-time Premier League record for most goal involvements by a player in a single season. In fact, if he continues at his present rate until the end of the campaign, he’s on course for 57 goal involvements… the current record stands at 47, and even that has a giant asterisk against it. So all hail King Mo: we may never again see a season as remarkable as the one Salah is producing in 2024/25.
Cole, Shearer and the Giant Asterisk
As you may be aware, there hasn’t always been 20 teams in the Premier League. In the early days of the competition’s existence, some 22 clubs would do battle over the course of the season, which meant that each played 42 games; rather than the 38-game campaign we know today.
Those four extra games offered the players an opportunity to add more goal involvements to their tally, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the current all-time Premier League goal involvements record is jointly held by two players from this era.
Andy Cole was the first player to record 47 goal involvements in a single EPL campaign. He did so for Newcastle United, notching 34 goals and assisting 13 others in a season in which he had a hand in a whopping 57% of the Magpies’ 82-goal haul.
34/13 – Andy Cole’s total of 34 goals & 13 assists in 1993-94 means that he is the only player to have topped both the goal & assist charts in a single Premier League season. Outstanding.@oilysailor picks the 15 most memorable stats in Premier League history for @OptaAnalyst.
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) April 2, 2021
Just one year later, Cole’s extraordinary feat was matched by another prolific marksman and creator: Alan Shearer. He was part of the Blackburn Rovers side that won the Premier League title in 1994/95, seeing off defending champions Manchester United by a single point.
Shearer was a vital part of that history-making team, serving up 47 goal involvements in their 42 EPL games – like Cole, that was 34 goals scored and 13 assisted, accounting for 58% of Blackburn’s entire output.
Henry and Haaland Lead the Way
As we’ve said, Cole and Shearer’s 47 goal involvements came during a 42-game season, as opposed to the 38 that has since become the standard. So who holds the all-time Premier League goal involvements record in this abridged era? Although two players qualify for the crown, we’re going to anoint Thierry Henry (2002/03) as the crown prince of Premier League goal involvements.
His tally of 44 during his historic 2002/03 campaign was split almost equally between goals and assists: 24g, 20a. It’s near-symmetry that just goes to show a) how good Henry was, but also b) how important he was to an Arsenal side that finished runner-up to Manchester United in the EPL title race.
It’s also, in the entirety of the Premier League’s 30+ year history, the only time that a player has recorded 20+ goals and 20+ assists in a single campaign. Va va voom, indeed. The other player to record 44 goal involvements in a Premier League season is Erling Haaland. He was outstanding in 2022/23 for Manchester City, but his haul – 36 goals, eight assists – is somehow less aesthetically-pleasing than Henry’s more equal split.
Lionel Messi’s Greatest Season: 2011/12
We now know what the Premier League goal involvements record is. But what about Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues of the EPL, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1. What is the best seasonal return? You’ll simply find no better documented campaign than that of Lionel Messi, one of the greatest ever to lace up a pair of boots. And, statistically at least, he hit his zenith during the 2011/12 campaign.
The Argentine was a young man on the books of FC Barcelona, with his jaw-dropping skill and eye for goal matched by the physicality that comes with being in your early twenties. And boy, did Messi cash in on that happy combination. He scored a scarcely believable 50 goals in 37 La Liga appearances, while still finding the time and energy to assist 16 more. That is, undoubtedly, the best return in a single season at the elite level.
He even did the business on European soil, too. In eleven Champions League appearances in 2011/12, Messi scored 14 times – a UCL record – and assisted five others. It was a season in which Barcelona won the Copa Del Rey, the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup, and yet the Catalonians finished second to Real Madrid in La Liga and lost in the Champions League semi-finals to Chelsea.
Messi’s exploits counted for very little in the competitions that, let’s face it, really matter. It’s a bizarre anomaly that in the icon’s best ever season, Barcelona only had lower-grade success to show for it.
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