As well as finishing the season with a bang by thrashing Wolves 5-0, yesterday saw our men’s first-team surpass 100 goals during a stunning campaign.
Granit Xhaka’s second of the game completed our century in all competitions, and marked the first time we have achieved that feat since 2018/19 when we reached the Europa League final. Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Jesus and Jakub Kiwior then also netted to ensure we finished on 103, with the Pole’s first strike in our colours seeing us reach 88 in the Premier League and break our previous best total.
Here we look at some more stats behind a remarkable season in front of goal:
Scorers
19 different players celebrated goals for us this term, and thanks to Bukayo’s final-day finish, three ended up as joint-top scorers in all competitions, with he, Martin Odegaard and Gabriel Martinelli all netting 15 times. It is the best goalscoring season of all of their careers so far.
Honourable mentions should also go to Gabriel Jesus who also hit double figures despite missing four months through injury, while Granit's first-ever brace of his professional career against Wolves brought his total up to nine which far surpasses his previous personal best of five.
William Saliba and Gabriel were our joint-top scoring defenders with three each, while we have benefitted from five own goals.
Assists
Saka led the way in terms of goals created for his teammates, with 11, however despite only making his debut in January following his arrival from Brighton, Leandro Trossard also reached double figures with two more against Wolves seeing him reach 10 in just 20 appearances. No player in the Premier League has more than our Belgian since his debut in red and white.
Odegaard, Martinelli, Jesus and Xhaka all managed to reach seven, while Fabio Vieira hit six spread across the league, FA Cup and Europa League - the same number as the hard-working Jesus. Ben White notably got five via his marauding runs from right-back, with 76 assists registered across the squad in total.
Competition
We netted 88 goals in the Premier League this season, which is the most we have ever scored in the competition’s history. It is the first time we have surpassed 80 since the 2009/10 season, and there had previously been only two other occasions that we have surpassed that milestone - in 2002/03 (85) and 2004/05 (87).
Martinelli and Odegaard finished as our top league scorers on 15 apiece, which is the first time since 1970/71 that we had two players hitting that milestone in the league, when John Radford and Ray Kennedy found their scoring boots.
We added another four in the two domestic cup competitions, with Eddie Nketiah getting three of them - he was the only player to score in all four competitions we played in this season. We also found the net 11 times in the Europa League with eight different players contributing to that tally, as well as one own goal.
Method
36 of our strikes were scored from our players’ right feet, while 46 came from the left. Martin Odegaard was responsible for 13 of those, having scored his other two with his weaker foot. We netted 16 headers, while we also converted three penalties.
Interestingly, Martinelli’s 15 goals came via a pretty balanced mix of eight with his right foot, four with his left and three with his head - no-one scored more in the air than the Brazilian.
Timings
Both our earliest and latest goals this season were scored by Martinelli. It took him just 58 seconds to open the scoring in our win against Liverpool back in October, while the simplest goal of the campaign saw him tap into an empty net at Aston Villa after 97 minutes and 29 seconds.
49 goals have come in the first half while the other 54 came after the restart. Other than Martinelli’s against Villa, five others came in the 90th minute or later and they all won points - Nketiah’s winner against Manchester United, Saka’s equaliser against Southampton, Emiliano Martinez’s own goal at Villa Park and Reiss Nelson’s epic winner against Bournemouth.
Venue
Emirates Stadium has been buzzing all season long, and our players have given our supporters plenty to celebrate - notably the 60 times they have hit the back of the net in front of either the North Bank or the Clock End.
The most we netted in one game was the five we put past Nottingham Forest in October as well as the final day thumping of Wolves, with those 5-0 scorelines the biggest we racked up anywhere during the campaign.
That means the other 44 goals came on our travels, with us scoring the most at the Amex Stadium and Villa Park, courtesy of our 4-2 wins against Brighton and Aston Villa respectively.
Opponents
We scored at least once against every team we have faced this season in all competitions with Wolves conceding the most with seven, while Aston Villa, Bournemouth and Crystal Palace each let in six at our expense.
Five were netted against seven other teams, notably Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur during our north London derby double, while PSV Eindhoven boasted the best defensive record against us as they were the only team we scored just once against when Granit Xhaka fired home the winner at Emirates Stadium back in October.
Goals per game
Our goals this season have come from 49 matches, that’s a rate of 2.10 per game. It’s our highest rate of scoring since 2016/17 and only the second time in the past 12 years that we’ve averaged more than two per match.
This is the 21st season (out of a total of 119) that we’ve brought up a century of strikes, the most we ever scored in a single campaign was 135, way back in 1930/31.
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