Who is the greatest goalscorer of all-time? Well, if it purely boils down to the number of times the ball has hit the net it has to be Cristiano Ronaldo, with Lionel Messi not far behind.
Pele must come into the equation along with Gerd Muller, Jimmy Greaves, Robert Lewandowski and Ferenc Puskas if we’re really digging into the past and there are numerous others who receive an honourable mention in dispatches.
But standards have never been higher than they are now in the Premier League and, if we are putting the English elite above all else which is a reasonable assumption, then Alan Shearer is the best pure finisher with 260 goals followed by Harry Kane with 213 and Wayne Rooney with 208 as they have crashed them in against the most difficult opposition.
Basically, though, it doesn’t really matter if you include those golden days before the Premier League or not because Erling Haaland is on course to top the lot regardless.
He has been compared to a striker on cheat mode in a video game and football’s version of The Terminator because he’s unstoppable, relentlessly gobbling up chances even if he is a peripheral figure at certain times in matches.
His bagged his hat-trick against West Ham on Saturday despite only having 20 touches in the 90 minutes and it followed another treble at home to Ipswich the previous weekend.
What’s more the 70 league goals he has registered for Manchester City since joining them from Borussia Dortmund, where he also scored for fun, in the summer of 2022 are only six fewer than Everton have scored in total in that time.
England and Newcastle forward Shearer holds the record for the most Premier League hat-tricks in a campaign with five for Blackburn Rovers in the 1995/96 season and that target is easily in reach after Haaland’s flying start this term.
He’s 5/1 with bet365 to set a new record by scoring over 5.5 hat-tricks this season and that would make the 4/1 on the Norway striker being the PFA Player of the Year unmissable at 4/1 with the same firm.
And given Manchester City are likely to press deep into the Champions League, it’s worth a flutter he is that competition’s leading scorer at 3/1 with Bet Victor.
• Alexander Zverev is 4/6 with Bet Victor to beat Taylor Fritz in the US Open men’s singles quarter-finals at Flushing Meadows.
• Aryna Sabalenka, last year’s losing finalist, is 5/6 with bet365 to beat Zheng Qinwen in straight sets as she closes in on becoming the Queen of Queen’s by winning her first, elusive US Open singles title.
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