The five players who have scored the most Premier League goals since turning 30
Leicester City icon Jamie Vardy has proven himself one of football’s great late bloomers, having scored over a hundred Premier League goals for the Foxes since his 30th birthday.
But how does that record compare to the great golden oldies of the modern era?
Here are the five players that have scored the most Premier League goals since turning 30.
5. Teddy Sheringham – 77 goals
Twenty-five years passed between Sheringham making his debut for Millwall in 1983 and hanging up his boots at Colchester United in 2008.
The striker did his time in the lower divisions, particularly early on at Millwall, but he also spent 15 years of that remarkable quarter-century career was as a Premier League player with Tottenham, Manchester United, Portsmouth and West Ham.
Sheringham was 30 Euro ’96 and was 33 years of age by the time he played a starring role in Manchester United’s 1998-99 treble. Over half – 77 – of his total 146 Premier League goals were scored after turning thirty.
He’s also the only player in Premier League history to score after turning 40, with the last of his 146 top-flight goals coming for West Ham against former flame Portsmouth aged 40 years and 268 days on Boxing Day 2006.
4. Frank Lampard – 82 goals
By the time that Frank Lampard turned 30 in the summer of 2008, he’d already had a career that most can only dream of.
Ninety-five goals as a midfielder. Over 150 appearances for his boyhood club West Ham and a further 350+ for Chelsea.
He’d also won (almost) everything there was to win with the Blues, with two Premier League titles, two League Cups and one FA Cup – while agonisingly close to the Champions League with that rainy penalty shootout final defeat to Manchester United in Moscow.
But there’d be so much more to come from Lampard after turning 30. One more Premier League title in 2009-10, in which he boasted a career-best tally of 27 goals, three more FA Cups, and finally the Champions League, against the odds, in 2012, plus a Europa League for good measure the following year.
Lampard also scored 82 Premier League goals, which sees him sixth in the all-time top scorers list on a total of 177. He wasn’t even done after leaving Chelsea, with six of those goals coming in a weirdly memorable one-year sojourn to Manchester City in 2014-15.
3. Alan Shearer – 84 goals
Shearer obviously features here; the Premier League’s all-time record goalscorer scored 84 of his 260 goals after turning 30 in the summer of 2000.
He played for another six years at his hometown club Newcastle United, eventually eclipsing Jackie Milburn to become the Magpies’ all-time top goalscorer in his final season at 35.
You can imagine that Shearer’s record would’ve been under serious threat had Harry Kane stuck around, but the England captain instead went overseas and signed for Bayern Munich at the age of 30.
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2. Ian Wright – 93 goals
An inspirational figure when it comes to the art of graft, Wright was already 28 years of age when the Premier League was shinily rebranded in 1992.
The vast majority of Wright’s 113 Premier League goals came after he turned 30.
“[When I think about Arsenal] I think about Arsene Wenger coming to Highbury and giving me a new outlook on life in my 30s,” Wright wrote in the Players’ Tribune, crediting the legendary French coach for his record.
“Wenger is an artist, a manager who would look at you and see something more. He steered Arsenal into the 21st century and deserves a lot of credit for turning our club into a great club.”
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1. Jamie Vardy – 103 goals
In this age of elite academies and extensive scouting, you could be forgiven for assuming that Wright might’ve been the last of that late-bloomer, non-league to Premier League success story.
You’d be oh so mistaken, with Vardy’s story arguably even more impressive.
The striker turned 28 midway through the greatest season of his career, in which he fired home 24 Premier League goals to fire Leicester City to their fairytale title in 2015-16.
That was only Vardy’s second season in the top flight, and the first time that he’d scored 20+ goals outside of non-league.
As with everything else about Leicester that year, it could so easily have been a freak one-off – but he’s aged like a fine wine (or port) and proved it was no flash in the pan, beating the likes of Harry Kane and Mohamed Salah to a Golden Boot in 2019-20 and becoming the first and only player to notch a century of Premier League goals after turning 30.
A modern-day phenomenon.