Bagging Premier League hat-tricks is not for everyone. The feat eluded Niall Quinn despite the towering target-man converting 59 top-flight goals across many a season.
Craig Bellamy never managed one either, nor did Paolo Di Canio for that matter, and this suggests that a fiery temperament is not best suited to scoring three in a single game.
Most Premier League Hat Tricks:
- Sergio Aguero – 12
- Alan Shearer – 11
- Robbie Fowler – 9
- Michael Owen – 8
- Harry Kane – 8
- Thierry Henry – 8
- Erling Haaland – 8
That’s because to do so requires a cold, clinical edge from the opening minute to the last. A relentless desire to get on the end of everything. Simply put, to never be satisfied with a mere two. To never be satisfied, full stop.
Nobody could claim that the seven natural born finishers below didn’t possess these traits in spades.
They defined themselves by goals. Indeed, they probably expected to score three-plus every time they crossed the white chalk.
Of course, there is one among them who is set to smash all records when it comes to top-flight hatties, should he remain in English football for a while yet. We will get to him shortly.
Michael Owen – 8
A teenage prodigy, Owen notched on his debut for Liverpool and then never stopped, quickly racking up formidable numbers that even now are gob-smacking.
Aged 18 he banged in 18 league goals for the Reds. Having just turned 19, he secured his first hat-trick, away at Sheffield Wednesday.
He was still a teen when he fired another hat-trick, this time at Newcastle, following that up soon after with a quartet of strikes in a single afternoon at Anfield.
Owen was already well on his way to scoring 118 in 216 Premier League appearances for his boyhood club.
Harry Kane – 8
Having spent time on loan at Leicester, aiding his development, Kane showed scant gratitude by firing his first hat-trick against them in the spring of 2015. There followed one a season on average as
Tottenham’s record goal-scorer ran riot in the English top-flight, terrorising goalkeepers and breaking opposition hearts for close to a decade.
It should not be forgotten either that Kane has to date fired five hatties for his country, one of which came in a World Cup finals.
Thierry Henry – 8
Mr Va-Va-Voom scored a hat-trick every 32 games for the Gunners and so sublime was his talent, and so immense his contribution to English football, that it genuinely surprises to learn that he ‘only’ scored eight in the league for Arsenal.
It also surprises that it took him 49 games – and 27 goals – before he secured his first, an undoing of Leicester that was made to appear straightforward but really wasn’t. Naturally, none were tap-ins.
Once in the groove however there was no stopping him, his best – and most memorable – treble coming at the expense of Liverpool in Arsenal’s Invincible season.
His first was a cool dispatching of a long ball. For his second he slalomed past Did Hamann and Jamie Carrgher, sending both players to the deck in sheer bewilderment.
He finished off proceedings with a clever angled run and neat poke from close range.
“Who could argue that this is the world’s hottest striker?” So asked commentator Peter Drury and not one of the watching public raised their hand.
An interesting quirk is that all eight of Henry’s trios were scored at Highbury.
Erling Haaland – 8
There are many different ways to try and put Haaland’s freakish goal-scoring feats into some form of context, all of which blow the mind.
Try this one for size.
The Striking Viking has already equalled the same number of hat-tricks as Harry Kane, Michael Owen and Thierry Henry, three of the greatest practitioners of forward-play this country has ever witnessed.
Kane reached eight trebles after 320 appearances. Henry needed 258. Owen, 326. Haaland has matched them after just 70 outings in sky blue.
By the time he’s done he will surely surpass Sergio Aguero and be crowned as the Premier League’s hat-trick king. It could well be a figure nobody else comes close to for the rest of time.
So prolific is the 24-year-old he really should have his own section in the live betting markets. He is a law unto himself.
Robbie Fowler – 9
It is August 28th, 1995, and Liverpool are hosting Arsenal at Anfield.
A week earlier, for the season’s curtain-raiser, the Reds had thrashed Crystal Palace 6-1 so they were in fine spirits. The Gunners for their part were very much a side in transition, two years away from Arsene Wenger’s arrival.
That takes nothing away though from what transpired that afternoon, with teenager Robbie Fowler bagging two in quick succession, just two minutes apart in fact.
Liverpool’s wonderkid had got on the score-sheet against Palace and already had a league hat-trick to his name. But this wasn’t just about whether he could add a third. History was beckoning.
One minute and 49 seconds later and a momentous feat was duly achieved, a lofted throughball by John Barnes finding the artful prowler in a yard of space. The rest was inevitable.
Fowler scored eight other hat-tricks – all but one of them for Liverpool, the other for Leeds – but a three-goal maelstrom inside five minutes was unprecedented and special.
Alan Shearer – 11
From the mid-Nineties to the mid-2000s, Newcastle were never favourites in the Premier League betting for any meaningful silverware but in Shearer they possessed the most fearsome striker in the world.
A colossal 260 Premier League goals is testament to that, a figure that is streets ahead of the rest, some of whom are stonewall goal-scoring legends in their own right.
It’s a century more than Mo Salah’s current tally. It’s 52 more than Wayne Rooney.
Naturally, such an abundance of finishes includes a high number of hat-tricks, 11 to be precise and here we return to the introduction and those rare traits.
Shearer had a relentless obsession to hit the back of the net on a weekly basis right through to the final whistle.
Sergio Aguero – 12
The Argentine was a one-man spree of pace, trickery and lethal execution who fired 184 league goals for Manchester City in 275 appearances. That equates to a strike every 107 minutes across 10 goal-laden seasons.
Thirty-six of this tremendous haul – or 19.5% - was made up of hat-tricks, or sometimes more too.
Against Newcastle in 2015, Aguero blasted five goals inside 20 minutes, from just nine touches of the ball in that period, before being subbed with ample time left.
An unheard-of double hatty was surely on the cards that afternoon given the haunted look in the goalkeeper’s eyes.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
