The fastest players to reach 100 Premier League goals: Haaland, Shearer, Henry, Salah… | OneFootball

Manchester City striker Erling Haaland has obliterated the record of becoming the fastest player to reach 100 Premier League goals – but how does he compare to the legendary players in the hundred club?

Haaland scored his 100th Premier League goal in Man City’s madcap 5-4 win over Fulham, spanking his shot past Bernd Leno and ending a disgraceful three-game goal drought.

Here are the 10 fastest players to reach 100 Premier League goals.

=10. Andrew Cole & Michael Owen – 185 games

Kicking off our list are two 90s legends who couldn’t quite replicate their most prolific, force-of-nature form into their latter years.

Older and a few years ahead, Cole caught the eye in the second tier during the inaugural 1992-93 Premier League season.

After firing Newcastle United to promotion, he announced himself as a devastatingly brilliant striker with 43 goals in 58 top-flight games for Kevin Keegan’s Magpies.

Cole’s rate of return dipped slightly as he collected league titles with Premier League titles but he still regularly hit double figures to eventually reach a century in the Red Devils’ 1998-99 treble campaign.

Owen burst onto the scene five years later, scoring 18 goals in 36 games in his first full season for Liverpool.

He never managed a 20-goal campaign, but he won two Golden Boots and was remarkably consistent with a one-in-two strikerate, somewhere between 10 and 20 goals in each of his seven full seasons at his boyhood Reds.

9. Les Ferdinand – 178 games

Just ahead of Cole is the player Newcastle signed to replace him.

One of the most underrated goalscorers of the Premier League era, like Cole he never took penalties. Not one of Ferdinand’s 149 top-flight goals was from a spot-kick.

“Now, I sit here and regret it,” he later reflected in an interview with The Athletic.

“And, as I’m having this conversation, I’m thinking, ‘You idiot. Why didn’t you take them?’ I was young and I thought differently back then. But it was a silly thought process.”

You imagine Sir Les would be a few places higher in this ranking were he on penalty duties…

8. Robbie Fowler – 175 games

Liverpool were blessed with not one but two generational goalscoring talents who rose through their ranks in the first decade of the Premier League.

Fowler made his Premier League debut for his boyhood club in 1993 and reached the hundred milestone before the new millennium. His career-best hauls of 25 goals in 1994-95 and 28 in 1995-96 briefly had him challenging Alan Shearer as the best striker in the country.

7. Ian Wright – 173 games

A bit of a technicality, this one.

Wrighty had been a professional footballer for seven years and had three top-flight seasons under his belt by the time the Premier League was rebranded in 1992. He’d already scored over a hundred league goals.

At that point, he was absolutely flying, having earned a career-defining move to Arsenal, scoring a career-best 29 league goals, the year before. He continued to soar in those early Premier League years, averaging 17 league goals a season across his six full campaigns with his beloved Gunners.

6. Mohamed Salah – 162 games

No ranking of the Premier League’s greatest goalscorers would be complete without Liverpool’s Egyptian King.

Salah has scored 250 goals for the Reds since signing from Roma back in 2017. That puts him above the all-time top goalscorers at Chelsea, Arsenal and Newcastle United – while he’s got Wayne Rooney’s Manchester United tally in his sights.

5. Thierry Henry – 160 games

Arguably the greatest player in Premier League history, Henry only needed 160 games to reach a century of goals after becoming Arsenal’s club-record signing back in 1999.

Imagine if he’d hit the ground running from day one.

Believe it or not, Henry actually endured a slow start to life in England…

READ: The Premier League legend you will not believe went 007 after record-breaking transfer

4. Sergio Aguero – 147 games

Aguero exploded onto the scene after his big-money, much-hyped move to newly minted Manchester City, banging in eight goals in his first five games for the club — a sign of things to come.

The Argentinian fired City to two Premier League titles in his first three years, eventually reaching his century in his 147th appearance, a 1-1 draw with Newcastle during Manuel Pellegrini’s underwhelming final season.

“We cannot replace him. We cannot…” Pep Guardiola famously said of City’s all-time top goalscorer. You’d be surprised, Pep…

3. Harry Kane – 141 games

This includes three goalless games on loan at Norwich City back in 2012-13. Little did the Canaries know what they had; a future England captain and the nation’s all-time top goalscorer.

After those relatively forgettable early loans away (Leyton Orient in League One, Millwall and Leicester City in the Championship), Kane swiftly started to demonstrate what he’s made of upon returning to his parent club.

Now he’s smashing hundred-goal records, at the peak of his powers, out in Germany.

2. Alan Shearer – 124 games

The man at the top of the Premier League’s scoring charts held this record for almost 20 years.

Like Wright before him, he had a bit of time pre-rebrand to get warmed up. He’d scored 23 goals in 118 appearances in the old first division for Southampton, in which time he honed his craft to become one of the most unstoppable centre-forwards in Europe.

Shearer moved to Blackburn Rovers for a British transfer record in the summer of ’92 and started as he meant to go on with a brilliant brace on his debut.

Like Haaland, he made it a century of goals in his fourth season, but he might’ve made it in three had an ACL injury not stunted his progress.

1. Erling Haaland – 111 games

It’s taken just 111 games for Haaland to smash through the 100-goal barrier — a freakish return even by his own superhuman standards, reaching the tally against Fulham.

Since landing in Manchester, he’s treated Premier League defences like his own personal plaything.

Shearer breathed a sigh of relief when Kane left for Germany, but Haaland’s surely coming for his No.1 crown if he sees out his contract to 2034.

And on current form, you wouldn’t be surprised if he needs even fewer games for the next hundred.