Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah is enjoying the best Premier League season statistically for an attacker, topping the list for the best minutes-played-to-goal-contributions ratio in the competition’s 33-year history with his performances in the first 18 games of 2024-25.
But is there more to consider when debating which attacking player has had the best Premier League campaign of all time (or two months of one, as with one of the picks below)? Is a player outperforming his team-mates week after week more worthy of mention than somebody whose goals and assists went a long way to winning his side the title? Or is it strictly about earning the Golden Boot and dominating the division?
Here, a group of our writers nominate the attacking player they think had the best Premier League season in history.
Let us know who they missed out, and what you think, in the comments below…
Didier Drogba (Chelsea, 2009-10)
As with all forwards who qualify as ‘great’, it’s hard to pick a single Drogba season as the best. His legacy is better judged by his complete body of work over eight campaigns at Chelsea, culminating in that picture-perfect denouement in the 2011-12 Champions League final (we won’t count his return for a ninth year at age 36 in 2014-15). But seeing as we’re choosing, the one in which he scored almost a goal per game (37 in 44) and won the league title and FA Cup double — an achievement, for younger readers, that used to matter — seems to fit the bill.
Drogba with the Premier League trophy in May 2010 (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
This is the best way to express how good Drogba was in his prime. Some players have cup finals named after them. Others get pieces of technical trickery. A few might even, in some sense, get a whole season. Drogba, though, basically retired an entire position. For Carlo Ancelotti’s team that year, and for Chelsea for the better part of a decade, he was a one-man forward line: target man, fox in the box, an aerial threat who ran the channels, a No 9 and a No 10, capable of scoring tap-ins and howitzers and all sorts of goals in between.
The timeline here isn’t perfect but before Drogba, teams played with two strikers. After him, they played with one.
Rory Smith
Gareth Bale (Tottenham Hotspur, 2012-13)
Andre Villas-Boas’ Tottenham side of 2012-13 were built almost entirely around the hope that, in each game, Bale would do something at some point. It was ultimately good enough for fifth place in the Premier League and allowed Bale to score 21 goals from 33 league appearances but — and this is why he belongs on this list — that happened despite that dependence and the attention it drew to him.
Another winning Bale goal, this time against West Ham in February 2013 (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
Stop Bale, stop Spurs: that was a reasonable game plan — and yet…
GO DEEPER
The Premier League 60: No 26, Gareth Bale
One of the marks of real excellence in sport has always been the ability to succeed even if the opponent knows exactly what you are about to do. That was Bale in 2012-13, time and time again. He would receive the ball with a forest of defenders between him and the goal, he would shift his feet quickly or find a gear of extra speed, enough to evade two or sometimes three players, and then find a finish to change the game.
A dominant player on a team that was anything but dominant.
Seb Stafford-Bloor
Thierry Henry (Arsenal, 2003-04)
The 2002-03 season is an underrated year for Henry, in comparison with the one that followed it.
Twenty-four goals and 20 assists (a proper 20/20 campaign) announced him as something very close to the complete Premier League attacker, as sharp a creator as he was a finisher. I’m yet to be convinced that the division has seen a better forward than peak Henry.
But 2003-04 took him even closer to his zenith.
He scored 30 times in the Premier League, underpinning the relentlessness of Arsenal’s title-winning Invincibles. He started 37 of the 38 league games. He was the Premier League’s player of the year (basically uncontested by all but the best of his team-mates at Highbury) and his highlights reel from those nine or 10 months is a joke. Individually, it was a build-a-statue triumph — so Arsenal did.
(David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Phil Hay
Eric Cantona (Manchester United, 1995-96)
Cantona scored 14 Premier League goals in the 1995-96 season. A perfectly respectable return, but nothing more than that. However, it’s what those goals did that makes this amazing. Cantona started that season on football’s naughty step, serving the last few months of his ban for kung-fu kicking Crystal Palace fan Matthew Simmons in February 1995. He scored upon his return, against Liverpool in the October, but was relatively quiet for a few months after that.
And then, in the March and April, Cantona scored in six consecutive games, four of which were the only goal in 1-0 wins (including against Newcastle United, who at that stage were well ahead in the title race), another was a 90th-minute equaliser and the other set United on their way to a 3-2 victory. So, in short, without those goals, Manchester United would have been 11 points worse off than their championship-clinching total and would have struggled to finish third.
Cantona scores the winner against Newcastle in March 1996 (Stu Forster/Allsport)
This was the season of Kevin Keegan’s ‘I would love it…’ meltdown, in popular memory the symbol of one of football’s worst chokes as his Newcastle side relinquished a 12-point lead. But they didn’t so much lose the title to Manchester United that season: they lost it to Eric Cantona.
Nick Miller
Erling Haaland (Manchester City, 2022-23)
Manchester City had won four out of the five previous Premier League titles before deciding to sign striker Erling Haaland from Germany’s Borussia Dortmund ahead of the 2022-23 season. Before he had even kicked a ball in a City shirt, they were overwhelming favourites to be crowned champions again in his debut campaign.
His prior exploits in the Bundesliga (both the Austrian, with Red Bull Salzburg, and German versions) and Champions League meant he was already one of the most feared strikers in the game, so adding him to England’s best team could only mean one thing, right? Even more success. And Haaland did not disappoint.
Two goals against West Ham United on his Premier League debut were just the beginning of a record-breaking season. In the October, he became the first player to score home hat-tricks in three consecutive matches, which also made him the fastest Premier League player ever to three hat-tricks — he did it in eight games, beating Michael Owen’s previous record of 48 matches with Liverpool in the 1990s.
(Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
Haaland scoring was inevitable, and you could only look on in awe as a then 22-year-old ripped up the goalscoring record books in a season that saw City complete the treble by winning the Premier League, FA Cup and the Champions League.
The Norwegian scored 36 goals in 35 Premier League appearances, winning the Golden Boot and beating Alan Shearer’s and Andy Cole’s long-standing record of 34 in a single league campaign.
Dan Sheldon
Stan Collymore (Nottingham Forest, 1994-95)
OK, let’s get this out of the way straight away: there are going to be people who scoff when I say Stan Collymore, 1994-95, was the nearest thing English football has ever had to Brazilian Ronaldo.
How, you might ask, can such a claim be made when the player in question won only three England caps? And that’s a good question (with Collymore, it was never straightforward).
(Steve Etherington/EMPICS via Getty Images)
But I know what I saw that season and many others do, too. Get the ball to Stan, was the instruction to Nottingham Forest’s players, and he will do the rest — often spectacularly, and sometimes from the halfway line if he was in the mood, which he invariably was.
Collymore scored 25 goals that season, including 22 in the Premier League, as Frank Clark’s promoted team finished third. Other players may have scored more, but nobody was more electrifying. It is just a pity, 30 years on, that it is always a battle convincing everyone of his brilliance, because brilliance is what it was.
Daniel Taylor
Robin van Persie (Arsenal, 2011-12)
It’s a difficult call between the Dutchman’s final season for Arsenal and first as a Manchester United player a year later, but there are a few things that elevate the former as being ever so slightly more impressive.
The stats aren’t all that different: in 2011-12, Van Persie scored 30 goals and notched 11 assists in 38 appearances; in 2012-13 (after moving to United), it was 26 and nine in as many matches. In both seasons he was the Premier League’s top goalscorer.
GO DEEPER
The Premier League 60: No 49, Robin van Persie
Some will point to the fact that Van Persie was instrumental to United winning their 20th (and most recent) title in 2012-13 under Sir Alex Ferguson as reason enough to call that his finest season. But if we are talking specifically about individual achievement then almost single-handedly hauling a rather average Arsenal side to a third-place finish just about trumps it. No other Arsenal player even reached double figures for goals scored that season and Van Persie ensured they qualified for the Champions League in his first season as captain, too.
Sarah Shephard
Tony Yeboah (Leeds United, 1995-96)
Suggesting the 1995-96 Premier League campaign belonged to Tony Yeboah (and not Alan Shearer — sorry, Alan) might be a misnomer but, for a couple of glorious months as late summer turned towards autumn in 1995, Yeboah really did feel to be the only show in town.
Two goals on the opening day at West Ham United were merely the aperitif for the goalscoring gluttony that followed. His thumping volley against Liverpool two days later, broadcast live on Sky’s Monday Night Football (that was still unusual then!), had to be seen to be believed. As did an arguably even better strike away to Wimbledon in the September to continue Yeboah’s monopoly on that season’s goal of the month award.
(Rebecca Naden/PA Images via Getty Images)
In between these two monstrous strikes, a gifted Monaco side featuring Thierry Henry, Basile Boli and Lilian Thuram had also been put to the sword on home soil via a Yeboah hat-trick in the UEFA Cup.
There was still a sublime Christmas Eve finish against Manchester United to come but, really, that day at Selhurst Park represented the Ghanaian’s peak, before injury and the subsequent appointment of George Graham as manager brought an end to a truly unforgettable stay for Leeds in the Premier League.
Yeboah only scored twice — both in the same March game at Queens Park Rangers — after Christmas that season. Thirteen other strikers also found the net more times, including Golden Boot winner Shearer with a colossal 19 more goals than him.
Richard Sutcliffe
Luis Suarez (Liverpool, 2013-14)
When recalling Luis Suarez’s extraordinary 2013-14 season, it’s sometimes easy to forget the dramatic events that preceded it.
That summer, Suarez appeared destined to leave Liverpool, and was still serving a suspension for biting Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic late in the previous campaign. Eager for a way out, the Uruguayan was told to train away from the first team by manager Brendan Rodgers, and there was the infamous £40million-plus-a-pound offer from Arsenal.
Yet he was eventually persuaded to stick around — and he certainly made his presence felt on Merseyside. Suarez scored 31 goals in 33 Premier League appearances, as well as providing 12 assists, forming a formidable partnership with Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling in Rodgers’ full-throttle side.
Suarez and Steven Gerrard celebrate at Anfield in October 2013 (Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Suarez felt like a cheat code in fantasy football that season. He scored four goals against Norwich City at Anfield — including two goal of the season contenders — and two other hat-tricks, against West Bromwich Albion and Cardiff City.
His performances almost fired Liverpool to an unlikely title as Rodgers’ side won 11 on the spin from February to late April before defeat at home to Chelsea gave Manchester City the chance to pounce.
This season would prove to be Suarez’s last at Liverpool and in England, but what a way to bow out.
Tom Burrows
(Top photo: Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
