For me Matt le Tissier takes the cake, managing to score 25 goals from midfield in the 1993/94 season for a Southampton team that finished 18th. Other strong contenders:
- Luis Suarez 13/14, honestly maybe the best individual season a player’s ever had in the league. 31 goals and 11 assists in 33 games in a Liverpool team that was largely Europa League level aside from Gerrard and Sturridge.
- Kevin Phillips 99/00, scoring 30 goals and winning the European Golden Shoe for newly promoted Sunderland.
Who’ve you got?
To the few people mentioning Le Tissier - he wasn’t a midfielder, he was more a number 10, with the whole team built to maximise his skills since he was the dictionary definition of big fish, small pond. And I think he was wildly overrated, because he occasionally scored a flashy goal for a crap team. All the bad parts of his game were tolerated because Southampton were unfashionable and he had “star power”. Laziest player I’ve ever watched, slow as molasses, with the agility of an arthritic wombat. He’d be nowhere near today’s premier league
Yeah I always hated the love players like him got, the whole “imagine if he tried his best” always pissed me off, just an excuse for lazy players.
And yet he still managed to carry the team season after season, which was the question posed.
But the Premier League goal montages would be so much poorer without his wondergoals
I would say that scoring 30 goals in a season is more than the “occasional flashy goal”
Don’t be disingenuous. It was 25 goals, not 30, and that was by some distance his best season. Only 19 of those were from open play. He averaged 10 non-penalty goals a year when a regular starter for Southampton (not including his last three years when he barely played).
So yes - he was wildly overrated.
Yeah, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Le Tissier called a midfielder. He wasn’t. If Le Tissier was a midfielder, so were players like Beardsley, Cantona, Bergkamp, Zola, Sheringham, and Di Canio to name a few. That support striker role is rare these days because not many teams play with 2 forwards.