Why has a team never scored 10 goals in a Premier League game?

When the best team in the league by quite a long way faces the worst team in the league by quite a long way, the fun for the neutral is not really an expectation of a proper contest but the prospect of goals, goals, goals.

Liverpool vs Southampton on Saturday falls very much into that category — the champions-elect against the team who, even with 11 games of the season remaining, are still in danger of setting a new record-low Premier League points total.

The sight of this sort mismatch presents us with a tantalising question: will this be the first-ever Premier League game where a team hits double figures?

The Premier League has seen 25 games where a team has scored seven times, nine where a team has scored eight and five when a team has scored nine. But never 10.

The last time that happened in the English top flight was on Boxing Day 1963, the day that has become a meme, as a screenshot of the bananas set of results does the rounds on social media every year or so. There was a 4-4, a 5-1, two 6-1s, two 3-3s and an 8-2. And, most relevantly for these purposes, a 10-1, with Fulham running out rampant winners over Ipswich, with future England manager Bobby Robson among the scorers.

Since then, there have been a number of close shaves, many games where it looked possible beforehand and several where we thought it was finally happening during it. Manchester United beat Ipswich Town 9-0 in 1995 and Southampton 9-0 in 2021. Tottenham Hotspur beat Wigan 9-1 in 2009. Leicester beat Southampton 9-0 in 2019. And Liverpool beat Bournemouth 9-0 in 2022.

But nobody has got over the hump.

Bournemouth sink without trace at Anfield in 2022 (Visionhaus/Getty Images)

The primary and most basic reason why nobody has yet managed it is obvious: scoring 10 goals in a game is bloody difficult.

The fact that it hasn’t happened in the English top tier for 62 years is proof of that, but it’s not just there. Since that day in 1963 it has happened six times in Germany (but the last was in October 1984), once in France (in 1965), once in Spain (in 2015) and not at all in Italy.

Between that most recent example in Germany — 1984 to today — the only time a team in Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues has reached double figures was when Real Madrid beat Rayo Vallecano 10-2 in 2015. Once in a little over 40 years. Or, if you prefer, once in 71,615 games.

It’s never happened in the Champions League, Bayern Munich’s 9-2 thrashing of Dinamo Zagreb earlier this season being the first time in the competition’s history that a single team has scored that many in a single game. Even in the old European Cup, in which the unrestricted draw would routinely pair one of the continent’s giants with an obscure minnow in the early rounds and produce some very lively scorelines, you have to go back to 1980 when Liverpool beat Finnish outfit OPS 10-1.

Similarly, at the men’s World Cup, which can also feature some flamboyant mismatches, it has only happened once in 964 games; when Hungary defeated El Salvador 10-1 in their first group game of the 1982 edition. Amusingly, Hungary then lost to Argentina and drew with Belgium, meaning they went out in the first round with a better goal difference than all but one of the teams that actually qualified.

The makeshift scoreboard in Elche, Spain at the 1982 World Cup (Karl Staedele/picture alliance via Getty Images)

It’s never happened at the European Championship, nor AFCON, nor the Asian Cup, nor the Gold Cup. It has happened three times at the Copa America (but not since 1975), and four times at the Oceania Nations Cup, three of which were perennial champions Australia (before defecting to Asia) unloading on tiny island teams.

In short, it’s a vanishingly rare occurrence and you generally need a pretty precise confluence of circumstances for these mega scores to occur. In that 1982 World Cup fixture, for example, El Salvador’s preparation for the tournament was disrupted by an actual war.

The instance in Spain, when Rafael Benitez’s Real Madrid beat Rayo Vallecano 10-2, the vanquished side had two players sent off by the 28th minute, thus had to face Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Gareth Bale for over 70 minutes with nine men. From that perspective, it’s possibly a surprise they kept it down to 10.

Still, that wasn’t the sentiment expressed by Rayo coach Paco Jemez after the game.

“We feel humiliated and abused,” he told AS at the time, railing against the red-card decisions that, in his view, had turned the game into a farce. “This doesn’t benefit Madrid, or us or Spanish football. We’ve lost a lot of credibility. Nobody won, we all lost. It’s shameful, a disgrace.”

Benzema celebrates one of Madrid’s 10 goals against Rayo Vallecano in December 2015 (Curto de la Torre/AFP via Getty Images)

Even when you think it’s going to happen, it doesn’t happen.

On 15 occasions in the Premier League, a team has scored five goals in the first half of a game — 50 per cent of the way to the promised land, so surely it’s definitely going to happen!

But as all of those adverts for financial products tell us, past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance: on 10 of those occasions, the victorious team has scored either one or zero goals after the break. The psychology of this is fairly basic: the winning team have the game won, so ease off and conserve energy, the losing team perhaps have a half-time reset and stiffen their resolve.

In fact, you’re just as likely to get a big final score with a more modest tally at halfway: in three of the five Premier League games when a team has scored nine, there have been more goals in the second half than the first.

One reason for teams failing to really go all out for double figures might lie in footballing morality and the unwritten rules of the game.

In the eyes of some, running up the score too much is simply not done, and the idea that a team should not inflict such humiliation on their fellow professionals is one that has cropped up several times over the years.

Of Manchester United’s 8-2 win over Arsenal in 2011, Sir Alex Ferguson wrote in his autobiography: “It actually reached the point where I felt — please, no more goals. It was a humiliation for Arsene.” According to his biographer Michael Crick, Ferguson also “had been praying United wouldn’t reach 10” in the 9-0 against Ipswich because “he felt sorry for the Ipswich manager, George Burley”.

Wenger makes his frustration clear as Arsenal are torn to shreds at Old Trafford in 2011 (John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)

This was also a topic of much discourse when the U.S. Women’s National Team beat Thailand 13-0 at the 2019 World Cup, the team coming under heavy criticism for continuing to rack up the goals after the game was well won, but also for having the temerity to celebrate those goals.

“We knew that every goal could matter in this group stage game,” Alex Morgan told the media after the game. “And when it comes to celebrations, this was a really good team performance and I think it was important for us to celebrate together.”

Much of the discourse and disapproval seemed to emanate from social media, not the most reliable source of nuanced discussion, but it also came from former players like Clare Rustad and Hope Solo, even if that was largely over the politics of celebrating the later goals.

But as in many scenarios where accusations of disrespect fly, when it came to actually asking the supposedly disrespected party, there was little outrage to be found.

“In football, everybody is following the rules, so our opponent is trying their best,” said Thailand’s manager Nuengrutai Srathongvian after the game. “The U.S. team was very good. We don’t have any excuse and we accept that they are better.”

Indeed, there have probably been as many examples of teams really wanting to go for the big numbers as there are those holding back.

Marc Albrighton was part of the Leicester team that beat Southampton 9-0 in 2019 and, as he tells The Athletic, they smelled blood quickly. “We knew early that we could be on for a big one. They had a player sent off early. The conditions weren’t great that day. You could sense their heads had dropped.”

And far from pitying their opponents or easing off once they knew the game was won, when it became clear that something special could be on the cards, they used it as motivation. “I remember Jonny Evans going round all the players saying ‘the record is nine, we can beat the record, get the ball back as soon as possible and just keep going, keep going, keep going.’ That mindset helps massively, because as we’ve seen, the games can die a bit when it gets to a certain score.

“We certainly didn’t feel sorry for Southampton. I can’t speak for everyone, but if I was on the other side of it, I’d hate it if the opposition felt sorry for us. Some of the players saw it as an opportunity to get their numbers up. The only thing that stopped us getting into double figures was we ran out of time.”

Brian McClair, who featured in United’s 9-0 against Ipswich, said in 2015 that his side were of a similar mindset. “We were ruthless. Nine could have been 10 or 11. We never stopped, we just kept going. We were never satisfied. They’d been smug about beating us over there (Ipswich won the reverse fixture 3-2), but it wasn’t a case of: ‘We’re going to humiliate you and grind you into dust.’ It was just: ‘We’re going to score as many as we can and keep going until it’s over.’”

Andy Cole clasps the match ball after completing a hat trick in the 9-0 win over Ipswich (Barrington Coombs/EMPICS via Getty Images)

Maybe the elusive double-figures game is coming.

Since Fulham’s 10-1 in 1963, there have been seven examples of teams scoring nine, and three of them have been in the last six years. Maybe it will happen soon. In a Premier League season that is rapidly running out of jeopardy and entertaining storylines, maybe this is one to which we can cling.

(Top photos: Getty Images)