Mikel Arteta may be trying to rebrand them as “finishers”, but the football lexicon has only one phrase for the players who spend their afternoons waiting for the nod: super subs. BBC Sport senior journalist Alex Bysouth has ranked the ten best in Premier League history, judging them on sustained output across a career rather than a single hot streak — goals and assists both count, and the bar is consistency.
Three players missed the cut despite notable numbers. Adam le Fondre holds the record for the most goals off the bench in a single Premier League campaign, five of his eight arriving in a three-game spell in January 2013. Hernan Crespo has the best goals-per-game ratio of the group but his six goals in 16 substitute appearances for Chelsea amount to a small sample, as do Mark Robins’ five in 14 outings as a replacement for Norwich and Leicester.
The countdown begins with Theo Walcott, who holds a curious double: he was substituted off 168 times, more than any other player in Premier League history, yet also built an impressive record from the bench. No one has more than his 14 assists as a substitute, with Ryan Giggs and Marc Albrighton level with him, and he scored 10 goals as a replacement across spells with Arsenal, Everton and Southampton — the fourth-best overall goal contribution tally off the bench. Victor Anichebe takes ninth. The former Everton, West Brom and Sunderland striker scored half of his 26 Premier League goals as a substitute, the joint-highest percentage of any player with at least 20 goals in the competition, and his 13 substitute goals place him joint-eighth on the all-time list, complemented by five assists. He edged out Divock Origi, who also scored half his Premier League goals off the bench but two fewer in total. Roman Pavlyuchenko was another near miss, with 45% of his 20 top-flight goals coming as a Tottenham substitute.
Daniel Sturridge lands eighth. He scored 17 of his 76 Premier League goals as a substitute, added seven assists from the bench, and took 22% of his overall top-flight tally as a sub during a career that took in Manchester City, Chelsea, Bolton, Liverpool and West Brom. His 24 total goal contributions came at a more prolific rate than every substitute in Premier League history bar Edin Dzeko and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Richarlison matches Sturridge for minutes per goal contribution but has eight fewer, and Danny Welbeck — the only current player in the top three, with 19 substitute goals, 12 of them during six years at Brighton — misses out despite, at 35 and now at Chelsea, still having time to climb.
Olivier Giroud, a World Cup and Champions League winner who never won the Premier League, is seventh. The Frenchman is second on the all-time substitute scoring list, with 21 of his 90 top-flight goals — almost a quarter — coming off the bench, and only Dzeko, Solskjaer and Javier Hernandez have a better minutes-per-goal record as a sub. He made 103 substitute appearances across ten Premier League seasons with Arsenal and Chelsea. Tore Andre Flo is sixth: 34% of his 38 Premier League goals came as a substitute, the eighth-highest ratio among players with 20 or more top-flight goals, and he is joint-eighth overall for goals from the bench. The first of them arrived three minutes into his Chelsea debut in 1997, and it was at Stamford Bridge that he produced his best Premier League output before a later spell at Sunderland. With three assists as a sub, he ranks fifth for minutes per goal involvement, contributing to a goal once every 78 minutes on average from the bench.
Javier Hernandez, fifth, scored 19 goals in 78 substitute appearances — a rate of 0.24 per game, bettered among players with at least 10 substitute goals only by Sergio Aguero. Some 36% of his Premier League goals came after he started on the bench, mostly for Manchester United but also later at West Ham, and he netted on average every 88 minutes as a replacement. Only Jermain Defoe and Giroud have scored more as a substitute, and he is among a leading group of seven, Defoe included, who have scored five match-winners from the bench. Edin Dzeko, fourth, scored 50 Premier League goals for Manchester City with more than a quarter of them as a substitute. Only Aguero and Hernandez have better goals-per-game ratios among players with 10 or more substitute goals, and his average of a goal every 83 minutes is matched only by Solskjaer. Add assists and he stands alone: 17 goal contributions in 56 top-flight games as a replacement, a return every 63 minutes. The most important was his stoppage-time header against QPR on the final day of the 2012 season, two minutes before the Aguero moment that everyone remembers. At 40, he is still scoring, now for Bundesliga side Schalke.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is third, and perhaps the most iconic super sub of all, largely because of one night in Barcelona. Having started Manchester United’s FA Cup final win over Newcastle four days earlier, he came on in the 81st minute of the Champions League final and toe-poked a stoppage-time winner after Teddy Sheringham had equalised against Bayern Munich. It capped a vintage few months, during which he also scored four goals in the final 10 minutes of an 8-1 win at Nottingham Forest in February. In the Premier League alone, his 17 substitute goals put him joint-fifth on the all-time list, representing 19% of his 91 top-flight goals at a ratio of 0.2 per game, with his average of a goal every 83 minutes off the bench matched only by Dzeko — though, as with Dzeko, he played for one of the dominant teams of the era.
Nwankwo Kanu is second. His impact at Arsenal was immediate: on his debut he collected a throw-in meant for a Sheffield United player — after the opposition had kicked the ball out for an injury — and crossed for Marc Overmars to score, sparking a famous FA Cup rematch. In the league he was just as ruthless. He made 56 of his 119 top-flight appearances for Arsenal as a substitute, and counting spells at West Brom and Portsmouth he scored 17 goals off the bench, 31% of all his top-flight strikes, placing him joint-fifth on the all-time substitute scoring list. He was almost as prolific at creating them, with 12 assists as a substitute — a tally bettered by only three players in Premier League history. Kanu had joined Arsenal from Inter Milan, having earlier won the Champions League with Ajax.
But goals are currency, and Jermain Defoe has more of them as a substitute than anyone else in Premier League history. Remarkably, all 24 came in different fixtures, meaning he has also scored in more games as a substitute than any other player, and a league-high five of them were match-winners. He scored six times as a substitute in his debut Premier League season, his first top-flight goal earning West Ham a 3-2 win at Ipswich, and he scored for the final time in the competition 17 years later, coming on to rescue Bournemouth a stoppage-time point at Watford. He is also England’s highest-scoring substitute, with seven goals. Throughout his career, the argument runs, Defoe was the ruthless finisher a manager wanted when anxiously glancing at the bench in need of a goal.