The Knowledge, the Guardian’s long-running football trivia column, has taken on a question few professionals would want answered in their favour: how many players have ended their senior careers with more own goals than goals scored for their own team? The query came from reader Peter Clark. The column had previously looked at the players with the most own goals on record, but never at those who finished their careers in debit at the wrong end.
Southampton cult hero Francis Benali is the leading English case. He scored only one goal for his own team across his career, and at least two own goals in red and white: a bullet header against Oldham in the 1993-94 season, and another against Manchester United in 1999-2000. The column concedes it could only find a couple of own goals for Benali, and that without a comprehensive Southampton database there is a chance some have been missed.
Riccardo Ferri, the formidable stopper in Internazionale’s title-winning side of 1988-89, scored six goals and eight own goals in Serie A. He may still be in credit overall, having scored three more goals in cup competitions, but his own-goal data is only available for the league. Jamie Carragher, meanwhile, finished his career with four goals and seven own goals, including two in a single match against Manchester United in 1999, and another in the 2006 FA Cup final — a game that ended considerably better for Liverpool. Some sources credit Carragher with five goals at the right end, including an equaliser against Middlesbrough in August 2008, though the official Premier League site records that one as an Emmanuel Pogatetz own goal.
Sven van Beek is the all-time leading own-goal scorer in Eredivisie history, with eight across 12 seasons and 193 matches for Feyenoord, Willem II and Heerenveen. He managed only five goals for his own team in those matches. Van Beek is still playing in Qatar and appears to have scored five goals at the right end for Al-Shahania. Another player on minus three is Luigi Zannier, a defender who turned out for several Italian clubs, including Milan, in the 1950s and 1960s, and who scored three and put in six at the wrong end in Serie A.
None of them, however, can match Everton’s Billy Balmer. At the turn of the 20th century he netted eight goals during open play, all of them at the wrong end of the pitch. In more than 300 appearances for the Toffees his only goal at the right end was a single penalty in 1899.
The column also addressed a question from Matt Walker about the earliest point in a season at which a top-flight team has been confirmed as having a trophyless campaign. It notes that the concept of a trophy has shifted over the past 15 years, particularly since Arsène Wenger described fourth place and Champions League qualification in those terms — but the focus here is on actual silverware. In England, cup hopes are often extinguished at the start of January, when Premier League clubs enter the FA Cup at the third round. Bournemouth were cited as an example last season, having been knocked out of both domestic cup competitions by 10 January; they were not, however, mathematically out of the title race at that point.
That distinction belongs to Derby County, who finished the 2007-08 season with only 11 points. They were knocked out of the League Cup on 28 August and the FA Cup in the fourth round on 26 January, and their inability to win the Premier League was officially confirmed in their 26th league match, on 9 February, when a 3-0 defeat by Tottenham, coupled with a victory for the leaders Arsenal, made the gap between top and bottom insurmountable.
Elsewhere, the main cup competition starts earlier, which means clubs can be forced to accept their trophyless fate before Christmas — realistically if not mathematically. The early rounds of the Coppa Italia are played at the start of the season, so weaker Serie A sides could crash out in September, as happened to Lecce in 1993-94 and Brescia in 1994-95. Neither was ever in title contention: Lecce won one of their first 23 games, Brescia none of their first 14, and both went out of the Coppa Italia in round two, the earliest possible stage for a Serie A club at the time. The column calculates that both were mathematically out of the Scudetto race after 22 of the 34 Serie A games — 6 February 1994 for Lecce and 5 March 1995 for Brescia.
On a lighter note, the column returned to the theme of players ending goalscoring droughts with a goal off the backside. Patrick Bamford was added to the list after his part-hip, part-backside finish during Leeds’ 4-3 win at Middlesbrough late in the 2023-24 Championship season, a period when the club’s automatic promotion push was stumbling in part because his goals had dried up.
Finally, the archive tackled the origins of the word ‘shithousery’, in response to a question first asked in 2022 about where and when the term was first used and whether other languages have an equivalent. Its root can be traced to Scouse slang of the 1960s, and the Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang carries an entry for ‘shithouse’, defined as ‘an extremely unpleasant individual’ and ‘a coward’. By the 1970s it had reached the east Midlands, where Brian Clough used the word so frequently that he described it as an affectionate term. Jack Charlton was equally fond of it, saying in 1990 that journalists were ‘all shithouses’, and a couple of years earlier that there was no room for shithouses in his Republic of Ireland squad. John Hartson, then at Arsenal, was sent off against Middlesbrough in January 1997 after calling the referee Mike Reed a shithouse.
The neologism ‘shithousery’ itself only emerged in the 21st century. It does not yet feature in the Oxford English Dictionary, and taking Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang as a baseline, the earliest citation is from 2014, with Nicolás Otamendi named as the alleged culprit. Looking further back, the first football personality accused appears to be Arsène Wenger in 2011, the accusation coming from the Guardian’s own Daniel Harris. The word became a wider part of the football lexicon in the 2010s, most memorably when one Arsenal supporter complained that Crystal Palace had ‘bantered us off for 90 minutes with shithousery’ — in a match Arsenal actually won 2-1.
Readers are also invited to help with three open questions: whether an 11-goal Allsvenskan thriller between AIK and Brommapojkarna, won 6-5 by Brommapojkarna with every goal coming in the second half, is the highest-scoring match in which all goals were scored in the same half; whether any player with 10 or more international caps has a 100% win record, a query prompted by Maidenhead United wing-back Jordon Ragguette’s call-up for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; and whether there is another case of a referee reversing a decision using a stadium’s giant screen, as happened when Hai Phong had a goal ruled out for handball by video replay in a 2022 Vietnamese league match against Nam Dinh, a year before VAR arrived in the country.