Exclusive Statistical Analysis of where Aubameyang will finish on Arsenal’s All-Time Goal Scoring List

All-time great? He will be

Now that our skipper has committed himself to the club for the next three years it may be time to consider where he might end up in the great pantheon of wonderful striking talent that have played for The Arsenal.

The list of superlatives used to describe Pierre Emerick Aubameyang has been lengthy throughout his career, but at Arsenal, playing ostensibly from the left, he has been more potent then ever. A striker that like a fine red wine appears to be improving with age, and his lack of major injuries, or even minor ones for that matter is encouraging.

Therefore, I thought it might be a fun exercise to project just where the great man might end up in the list of our list of our most prolific goal scorers, now we know we have three more peak seasons of him.

Arsenal currently has 19 players in their ‘Centurion Club’ and it is now a safe bet that Auba will make that elite list a rounder figure of 20 but the question is where he finishes, between 1 and 20.

Number 2 in the centurion Club

First let’s address the facts we have to date, regarding the goals he has scored to date and the average number of matches he is likely to play each season, based on what we have witnessed until now.

• We know that PEA has scored 72 goals in 112 appearances which give us his goal to game ratio of 0.643.
• We know that in his 2 full seasons with varying degrees of Cup success he has made 51 and 44 appearances. In 18/19 we went further in the Europa League and will hope to do so again but to be fair and conservative, let’s take his average appearances across both. His average appearances therefore are 47.5. I will round this up rather than down, as under Arteta, I envisage a longer stay in Europe. We can take our projected appearances as 48

Given these reasonable and conservative assumptions, combined with Aubameyang’s career consistency and excellent fitness history, where might this take our captain?

Firstly, to be fair we should notch of the 2 goals for this season and include them in a projected tally based on his ration across 48 matches.

So, at 0.643 x 48 we should expect a return of 30.864 goals, and we have three peak seasons potentially which could give us 92.59 goals to add to the 70 prior to this campaign. Let’s round this down and assume therefore 92 more goals, which would take him to a fabulous total at the end of 22/23 of 162.

Aubameyang therefore would end up at the end of this contract, should he see it out and if he continues with his current strike rate. placed  4^th on the all-time Arsenal Goal Scoring list, behind Henry, 228, Wright, 185 and Bastin on 178. He would be ahead of Radford on 149.

Faster than Henry

However, it is well worth noting that Auba’s will have reached that target of 162 in a projected 254 matches, far quicker than any Arsenal striker in history. Even TH14

Maybe keep this article and watch our current talisman’s progress, bearing in mind his realistic target to exceed is the great John Radford’s 149 to reach that 4^th spot in the all-time list. Only 78 goal to go!

Dave Seager

Passionate fifty-something Arsenal supporter who has been making the journey to N5 regularly since the early 1980s – although his first game was in 1976. Always passionate when talking about The Arsenal, Dave decided to send a guest blog to Gunnersphere in the summer of 2011 and has not stopped writing about the Gunners since.

He set up his own site – 1 Nil Down 2 One Up – in February 2012, which he moved on in 2016 to concentrate on freelance writing and building Gunners Town, which he launched with Paul in 2014.

The objective of GT was to be new and fresh and to give a platform for likeminded passionate Arsenal fans wishing to write about their team. Dave still of course, writes for the site himself and advises the ever-changing writing crew.