Spurs – and Souness – shamed by the longest-ever goalless starts to a Premier League season

Only one Premier League team has ever gone more games without scoring at the start of a season than Coventry and £300m spenders Spurs.

These are the longest goal droughts from the start of a Premier League campaign. Roberto De Zerbi and Frank Lampard (currently leading their teams to 360 goalless minutes) need to fix up sharpish to avoid surpassing Graeme Souness.

Sheffield Wednesday (371 minutes, 1993/94)
With David Hirst sidelined due to injury and Paul Warhurst sold to Blackburn, it came as little surprise that Sheffield Wednesday’s attack took a while to get going at the start of Trevor Francis’ third season.

Mark Bright remained and became the outright star, breaking the club’s duck in an August draw with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, and feeding off the supply of Chris Waddle, Andy Sinton and Chris Bart-Williams thereafter.

Gordon Watson pitched in with a dozen goals too as Wednesday overcame that four-game barren start to finish as the Premier League’s third-highest scorers behind champions Manchester United and third-placed Newcastle.

West Ham, Everton and Ipswich all shipped five in defeat at Hillsbrough to the Owls, who would probably have taken 7th if offered after drawing early blanks against Liverpool, Aston Villa, Arsenal and the Hammers.

Swansea (374 minutes, 2011/12)
It is, on one hand, a monumental shame that Brendan Rodgers didn’t say this…

“It is great for the public here at Sunderland to see us. They must have been wondering what this team everyone is talking about are all about and now they have seen. We were wonderful.”

…after a goalless draw in Swansea’s third game as a Premier League side.

It is, however, incredible that Rodgers did say that after a 2-0 defeat to the awestruck Black Cats the following January.

That stalemate was sandwiched between another in a professional shyster derby against Roberto Martinez’s Wigan, and a 1-0 defeat to Arsenal at the Emirates as the Swans stuttered gracefully in the top flight.

They were unfortunate to come up against Manchester City and a debuting Sergio Aguero in their first game, in all fairness.

And it all started coming together when their Premier League campaign belatedly started the same way their Championship promotion season finished: with a Scott Sinclair penalty. That broke the tension in a 3-0 win over West Brom as Rodgers eventually talked his way into 11th.

Aston Villa (427 minutes, 2025/26)
Neither Coventry nor Spurs will win a European trophy this season, and Champions League qualification feels slightly beyond them. But Aston Villa provide compelling recent proof that an abysmal start need not define the middle or end of a story.

As Unai Emery said after a goalless draw with Everton extended Villa’s drought from the start of the season to four games: “A little bit worried, but confident for the future.”

Their first goal of the season actually came from doomed loanee Harvey Elliott in the Carabao Cup. But in Premier League terms it was Matty Cash who breached the net in a 1-1 draw with Sunderland.

Villa pushed on from there, combining a fourth-placed finish with Europa League glory, and only failing to score six more times all season. It’s why Emery still retains the faith of the fanbase after starting the following campaign with three defeats and a draw.

Newcastle (438 minutes, 2005/06)
Before Graeme Souness made it his life goal to despise Paul Pogba, Declan Rice and every other midfielder who dares exist and not play like he did five decades ago, he embarked on a 20-year managerial career of no little repute.

But his eighth post was his last and “worst”; the experience of managing Newcastle “finished me” and the Scot “just didn’t want to be answerable to the type of people that were making football decisions” again.

It started to unravel long before his official demise in February 2006. Souness presided over a 2-0 defeat to Arsenal on the opening day of that season, then a goalless draw with West Ham before a couple more 2-0 losses against Bolton and Manchester United.

Any Newcastle fans understandably driven to insomnia by Sir Bobby Robson’s successor were fittingly roused by Charles N’Zogbia’s late equaliser against Fulham at St James’ Park in the club’s fifth game of the campaign.

That draw sparked a temporary turnaround in fortunes, but Souness was replaced by Glenn Roeder by the winter; Newcastle finished a respectable 7th as Alan Shearer bowed out with one final double-figure campaign.

Crystal Palace (641 minutes, 2017/18)
“We really thought we deserved something out of the game but we knew to do that, we had to score goals so when they came, it was hard to just sit there and nod your head wisely,” said an almost apologetic Roy Hodgson, having celebrated with Ray Lewington as if just informed by his long-time assistant that he had just booked them on a boat ride along the River Seine.

It was the first goal Hodgson had enjoyed as a Premier League manager in five years, five months and one day; the wait for Crystal Palace between Patrick van Aanholt netting on the penultimate day of 2016/17, and Cesar Azpilicueta deflecting a Yohan Cabaye effort past Thibaut Courtois in the eighth game of 2017/18, must have felt roughly as interminable.

As Hodgson added, “any goal would have been a good one really” by that point. Any tinge of regret at the great Palace dry spell being ended by an opposition player was eradicated once Wilfried Zaha scored the winner and jumpstarted a season which had stalled to a laughable degree under Frank de Boer.