Rooney Scores 50 goals for England – the data

Wayne Rooney has broken the England football goal scoring record with 50 goals. A lot of discussion has therefore been about if he is the greatest English attacker of all time or not. Let’s look at the data.

The main argument against Rooney being the greatest is his lack of World Cup Finals goals (1; at the 2014 finals). A comment which is also often made is about the number of “friendly” goals scored. Lineker (with a total of 48 goals for England, 3rd in the all time list) was recently voted as England’s greatest attacker in a BBC poll, managed 10 goals in World Cup finals (including the 1986 Golden Boot).

So what if we weight goals differently? What if we make friendly goals worth 0.5 a goal, and “finals” goals (i.e. the World Cup Finals and European Championships Finals) as times 2? What does that do to the all time scoring list?

(Here I count goals in the old “Home Championship” as ‘1’ (i.e. the same as World Cup and European qualifiers). Although there is an argument to be had that it should be weighted more heavily since it was the international competition for England before the World Cup got “big” (~pre-1950s). However, for now I’ll leave its weighting as ‘1’.)

In that adjusted table we get the following:

Ranking	Name	Adjusted Goals
1	Wayne Rooney	49
2	Gary Lineker	46
3	Bobby Charlton	43
4	Michael Owen	39
5	Jimmy Greaves	34.5
5	Alan Shearer	34. 5

You can see that Rooney is still number 1 - despite down weighting the friendly goals.

But okay, perhaps you think friendlies shouldn’t count at all and only competitive fixtures should be counted (the ‘Adjusted Goals’ column is if we again weight finals goals more heavily, the first ranking column is for the ‘non-adjusted’ goals):

Ranking	Name	Goals	Adjusted Goals	Adjusted Ranking
1	Wayne Rooney	36	42	1
2	Stephen Bloomer	28	28	6
3	Bobby Charlton	27	32	3
4	Michael Owen	26	32	3
5	Gary Lineker	24	34	2
6	Jimmy Greaves	23	24	8

Again, Rooney comes top for both the usual and adjusted goal tallies. (One way) to knock Rooney off that top spot (if you particularly want to for some reason) is to look at the ‘goals per cap ratio’. To use this stat we have to set a cap limit because of the people who didn’t play very much. For example, Albert Allen, Francis Bradshaw, John Veitch, John Yates and Rev. Walter Gilliat who were all capped once by England, and each scored a hattrick on their one, and only, appearance for England. This gives them a rather impressive 3 goals per cap ratio. If we only consider players who have at least 40 caps then:

Ranking	Name	Goals per cap
1	Jimmy Greaves	0.77
2	Gary Lineker	0.6
3	Peter Crouch	0.52
4	Geoff Hurst	0.49
5	Alan Shearer	0.48
6	Wayne Rooney	0.47

Finally, if you again weighted the goals (since Crouch scored 12 of his 22 goals in friendlies) you would find the order is Greaves, Lineker, Hurst, Shearer, Rooney (Crouch drops from 3rd to 8th).

I am not going to make any conclusions about if Rooney is England’s greatest attacker or not, that is up to you! All the data I’ve used in this post was collected from englandstats.com and is accurate as of today (11th September, 2015). If you want to play around with the data I’ve collated all the stats (player names, caps, minutes played and goals scored (separated into individual competitions)) into an Excel file available here.

Update

An updated data file, as of 2024-11-20, is available here. This includes an ‘Adjusted Total’ column which, as above, weights friendly goals as 0.5 and “finals” goals (i.e. the World Cup Finals and European Championships Finals) by a factor of 2.