20 Players With Most Goals Without Penalties in Premier League History

It’s been 19 years since Alan Shearer hung up his boots as the Premier League’s all-time record goal scorer and, following Harry Kane’s move to Bayern Munich, it doesn’t look like he will be losing that accolade any time soon. Alan Shearer scored 260 goals in 14 seasons in the rebranded top flight across spells with Blackburn and Newcastle.

With 30 goals, Kane moved from fifth in the standings to second during his final season in England, leapfrogging Sergio Aguero, Andy Cole and Wayne Rooney, and currently sits on 213 strikes, 47 behind Newcastle great Shearer.

Both Kane and Shearer scored their fair share of penalties during their time in the league and it got us thinking, what would the league’s all-time top scorer list look like with penalties taken out of the equation? We’ve crunched the numbers and there is a fair bit of movement inside the top 20…

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We kick things off with the players who just missed out on the top 20, with Romelu Lukaku at the bottom of the pile, followed by Dwight Yorke – both of whom found the net for Manchester United during their careers. Nicolas Anelka seemed to play for all the top teams bar the Red Devils on the other end of the spectrum, and he sits in 18th.

Jamie Vardy would often be ruthless from 12 yards, firing home with intent, but the man with the most Premier League goals after turning 30 certainly didn’t rely on spot-kicks as is proven by his 118 strikes. Raheem Sterling and former Tottenham star Son Heung-min are 16th and 15th, before Teddy Sheringham appears in 14th.

Next is Robin van Persie, who could score the most outrageous of goals when he wanted to and was usually as reliable on the volley as he was with penalties. He is the last foreign player in the bottom half, with Frank Lampard and Michael Owen rounding things out.

10

Robbie Fowler

Position with penalties included: 9th

Fowler drops down to 10th spot after his 17 successfully converted penalties are taken away from his tally. It’s fair to say Fowler peaked early on in his career, scoring 18 goals in his first senior season for Liverpool before tallying 30+ goals in each of the following three seasons.

Across his two spells with the Reds, Fowler netted 183 goals in 369 appearances. The 50-year-old also figured in the Premier League for Leeds United, Manchester City and, very briefly, Blackburn Rovers, but he is mostly remembered for his brilliant Liverpool career.

9

Jermain Defoe

Position with penalties included: 10th

Defoe spent the majority of his Premier League career at Tottenham, representing them across two spells from 2004 to 2008 and 2009 to 2014, but his Premier League penalty record for the North London club was woeful, scoring just four of the nine spot-kicks he took across his two spells at White Hart Lane.

He fared much better from 12 yards during his time at Portsmouth, scoring four times and missing once, before scoring six from six at Sunderland. Defoe scored five penalties during the 2016-17 season, with only James Milner notching more with the seven he scored for Liverpool.

8

Les Ferdinand

Position with penalties included: 12th

Ferdinand is one of two men in this list who didn’t take a single Premier League penalty, and that is why he finds himself five places higher than his position on the actual list of the Premier League’s all-time top scorers, leapfrogging Salah, Owen, Defoe, Fowler and Frank Lampard. Ferdinand told The Athletic in 2020:

7

Thierry Henry

Position with penalties included: 8th

Despite scoring 23 times from the spot in league games for Arsenal, Henry finds himself a place higher than his actual position by virtue of Frank Lampard, the usual man in sixth place, dropping out of the top 10 altogether.

Lampard scored 177 goals in the Premier League but a whopping 43 of those came from the penalty spot, meaning he netted fewer non-penalty goals than Fowler in 10th place on this revised list. World Cup winner Henry is arguably the league’s greatest-ever import, having won the Golden Boot four times during his time in England, including during Arsenal’s famous 2003-04 Invincibles season.

6

Mohamed Salah

Position with penalties included: =4th

Already the highest-scoring foreign player in Premier League history, Mohamed Salah will no doubt have eyes on joining the incredibly prestigious 200 club and usurping the likes of Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane before his time in English football is done. And while he has had some help with his expertise from 12 yards, it has clearly not been the be-all and end-all for him.

Of his 187 goals, 153 have been from open play. That means 34 have come from 12 yards. A small percentage in terms of the Egyptian’s total, but it is also the third-highest number of converted spot-kicks in the division’s history, so it would also be easy to say that Salah has had his fair share of freebies.

5

Sergio Aguero

Position with penalties included: 6th

There’s a strong case for Aguero being the most important signing of the Sheikh Mansour era at Manchester City. The Argentine striker hit the ground running at the Etihad after joining from Atletico Madrid in 2011, and of course rounded off the Blues’ season with that goal against QPR.

Aguero netted 27 penalties for City and he could be lethal in practically any situation when the ball was in range of the goal. Aguero also holds the distinction of being the only player in Premier League history to have scored four or more goals in a single match on three separate occasions.

4

Harry Kane

Position with penalties included: 2nd

Kane drops from second to fourth having scored plenty of Premier League penalties for Tottenham. Of course, he would almost certainly place higher on this list had he not joined Bayern Munich in 2023.

ith 33 successfully converted penalties, Kane ranks second on this list for the number of Premier League spot-kicks dispatched, with only the player in first spot having netted more times from 12 yards in the English top flight since 1992. At the time of writing, Kane is yet to miss a penalty for Bayern, scoring all 13 that he has taken.

3

Wayne Rooney

Position with penalties included: 3rd

Wayne Rooney was great at most things on a football pitch but his penalty record was not particularly impressive. Rooney scored 23 of the 34 penalties he took in the Premier League, giving him an unimpressive 68 per cent conversion rate. To put that into perspective, only Owen on this list has a lower conversion rate, while Kane and Henry boast the highest conversion rates on this list with 89 and 92 per cent respectively.

A quirk of Rooney’s underwhelming penalty record is that he ended up on the winning side on each occasion he missed from the spot (13 times in all competitions). And the fact that the United team he was part of was so dangerous meant he was always likely to get another chance from open play anyway.

2

Andy Cole

Position with penalties included: =4th

Andy Cole enjoys a healthy rise in the rankings as a result of scoring just one Premier League penalty, moving up from fourth place in the actual list of the league’s all-time top scorers. “I wanted to score goals in open play,” Cole told Manchester United’s media team in 2022. “I genuinely said that to myself. If I didn’t think I could do that, I don’t think I’d be good enough, that was a simple way to look at it. You can say that’s arrogant but I’m not arrogant. Football is played in open play and to have a penalty, I suppose it’s that simple, if you can’t score goals in open play, you’re not good enough to play at the elite level. That is the way I looked at it, even more so now, and I’m proud of my record.”

1

Alan Shearer

Position with penalties included: 1st

First place with penalties and first place without penalties, Shearer will have been sweating on his all-time top-scorer record while Kane was still at Spurs but there is a chance he will hold on to it for a long while yet following Kane’s move to Bavaria. Shearer scored 56 of the 65 penalties he took in the Premier League, giving him a conversion rate of 86 per cent.

Shearer’s standing at the top of the scorer charts is made all the more impressive by the fact he started his career in 1988, four years before the Premier League’s inception, so although his 260-goal tally in the Premier League is the record most commonly referenced, he actually has 283 English top-flight goals.