Will Harry Kane break Shearer's goal record? What the numbers say...
Tottenham were not necessarily deserving winners at Aston Villa on Sunday night. Having spent much of the first half fending off pressure from the Villans, Carlos Vinicius struck against the run of play to put Spurs ahead. Villa huffed and puffed but managed just one shot on target on their way to an eventual 2-0 defeat, with the absence of talismanic captain Jack Grealish once again impacting Dean Smith's side in the final third.
The story of the night, though, wasn't Spurs ending a miserable week on a high, but rather Harry Kane scoring from the penalty spot. Midway through the second half, Matty Cash fouled Kane, who duly sent Emiliano Martinez the wrong way to move level on 17 goals with Mohamed Salah at the top of the goalscoring charts.
The England captain ended the night as one of three players, along with Bayern hitman Robert Lewandowski and Barcelona supremo Lionel Messi, to have had a direct hand in 30 or more goals in Europe's top five leagues this season. Crucially, however, was that Kane's 17th league goal of 2020/21 moved him to within exactly 100 goals of Alan Shearer.
Kane has now scored 160 Premier League goals in his career, a fine achievement for the 27-year-old given his ankle injury concerns and his previous fear of scoring in August. On the top-10 leaderboard, the Spurs star is one of two active Premier League players to feature, with Sergio Aguero 21 goals ahead of Kane, a figure that the latter should surpass before too long.
The question now is whether Kane can leapfrog Shearer into top spot before he calls time on his career. The important factor, of course, is that time is very much on Kane's side. Plenty of forwards peak in their early to mid-20s, but there remains a general consensus that a striker will peak between the age of 26 and 30.
With that in mind, Kane is very much in the peak years of his career. By comparison, Shearer's best years, goalscoring wise, came shortly after his move to Blackburn in 1992, when he was just 21 years of age. Even in his first season, where he spent a spell on the sidelines after rupturing his right ACL, the striker still scored 16 goals in 21 appearances. In the subsequent three seasons, up until his 1996 move to Newcastle, Shearer was a goalscoring force to be reckoned with.
96 goals in 117 appearances was a superb return for Shearer, though it is worth noting that two of those three seasons came in a 42-match campaign. His debut season with Newcastle yielded 25 goals from 31 appearances, that his most prolific in a Magpies shirt. Shearer would break the 20-goal barrier a total of four times during his 10-year spell at St. James' Park, while his final two campaigns at the club brought about just 17 league goals across 60 appearances with injuries and the twilight years of his career limiting his impact.
In total, Shearer averaged 0.59 goals per game during his Premier League career. At present, Kane is averaging 0.68 goals per league match. The pair have differing styles of play, in that the former was widely considered a classic, barreling English centre-forward, with his strength and poacher's instinct a key reason for his impressive goal return. Kane, meanwhile, plays as a mix between a number nine and a number 10, comfortable at getting on the end of chances as he is creating them - he does have 13 league assists to his name, after all.
At his current rate of scoring, Kane will match Shearer's record in 147 league appearances' time, which would take us up to the second half of the 2024/25 season. Injuries permitting, it's an attainable feat for Kane, even playing for a manager as restrictive as Jose Mourinho, and with the goals drying up a touch in recent seasons. In the last two full Premier League campaigns, Kane has failed to break the 20-goal barrier, though with nine games still to play this season, he is expected to reach the 20-league goal mark between now and May.
It's also worth taking into account that, as of March 22nd 1998, when Shearer was the same age Kane is now, the Newcastle hero had scored 138 Premier League goals to the Spurs man's 160, though Shearer was averaging 0.78 goals per Premier League game at the same age as Kane. From that date onwards until the end of his playing career, though, Shearer did average 0.46 goals per game, a significant dip, something Kane will need to avoid in order to break that record.
For a player of Kane's mentality and need to play as regularly as possible, this increases the risk of muscle injuries and burn out. He sustained the former, a bad hamstring tear, on New Year's Day in 2020 and only saw out the season due to the COVID-19 pandemic that put the brakes on the Premier League season. It meant that he was able to maintain an average of playing 29.1 games per top flight campaign, not including the 2012/13 season where he made just four appearances across spells with Norwich and Spurs.
As his career progresses, it remains to be seen whether his body will allow him to continue that average at the risk of further injuries and a downturn in form. You only have to look at Wayne Rooney's decline in the latter years of his career as a cautionary tale about the risks that come with putting ones body on the line. Conversely, the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, at 36 and 39 years of age respectively, are still playing at the top of their game, while even 32-year-old Robert Lewandowski is streaks ahead in the race for the European Golden Boot with 35 goals to his name.
Yet the primary difference here is that the trio are playing in a, arguably, less demanding league than the Premier League, so Kane needs to err on the side of caution if he is to prolong his career enough to break Shearer's record. Then there is the notion that Kane needs to leave Spurs in order to truly smash the 260-goal mark.
"Let's be honest, if he goes to Manchester City, in my opinion he smashes Alan Shearer's record," former Newcastle and Spurs midfielder said recently. Given City have created more goalscoring chances (354) than any other Premier League team and 124 more than Spurs (230) in 2020/21, there's no denying that Kane would thrive in a side as creative as City's. The prospect of the striker latching onto Kevin De Bruyne's goalscoring opportunities is enough to make any side cower, but even in Mourinho's current Spurs setup, Kane has been faring well enough to eventually match Shearer's return, even if it would take a little longer to break the record.
"If he avoids injury and continues his career here rather than trying his luck abroad, he will have the opportunity," Shearer said of Kane four years ago and now within 100 goals of writing his name into the history books, it's clear that achieving the record is very much in the England captain's reach.
