Mohamed Salah’s departure from Liverpool to Trabzonspor this summer settles first place in this list beyond argument, and the four places under him turn over completely depending on whether you count goals or medals.
Salah will be a loss for the Reds on 23 August when they face Newcastle. The Egyptian has scored 10 goals on opening weekends, more than anybody in the competition’s history. He left Liverpool on a free transfer at the end of the 2025-26 season, and this is the first opening weekend since 2017 without him in the league. The latest football betting odds at Premier Bet will show that scoring multiple times on the opening weekend like Salah achieved on so many occasions is a rarity.
He has 193 goals in 328 appearances, fourth on the competition’s all-time list behind Alan Shearer on 260, Harry Kane on 213 and Wayne Rooney on 208. Sadio Mane and Didier Drogba come next among Africans, and neither is close.
| Player | Premier League goals | League titles |
| Mohamed Salah | 193 | 2 |
| Sadio Mane | 111 | 1 |
| Didier Drogba | 104 | 4 |
| Emmanuel Adebayor | 97 | 0 |
| Riyad Mahrez | 82 | 5 |
One and two: the two who scored most
Salah’s case is the easiest to make. He won the Premier League Golden Boot four times, level with Thierry Henry, the last of them in 2024-25 with 29 goals when Liverpool won the league. He won the players’ player of the year award three times, more than anybody else has.
Mane is second on 111 goals in 263 appearances, the second-highest total any African has managed in the competition. He won the league once, in 2019-20, which leaves him last of these five on medals and second on the measure this list is using.
Three and five: the two who won most
Drogba scored fewer and won more. He got 104 goals in 254 appearances across two spells at Chelsea, won the Golden Boot in 2006-07 and again in 2009-10, and won four league titles. He is also the only African among the 26 names in the Premier League Hall of Fame, inducted in April 2022. Surely Salah’s entrance into that list is not far away.
Mahrez is the fifth highest African scorer in the Premier League, but won more still. One title at Leicester in 2015-16 and four at Manchester City make five. When he left England in 2023, Manchester City called him the most decorated African the competition had had. In that Leicester season, he scored 17 goals and produced 11 assists in 33 league games. He also became the first African to win the PFA Players’ Player of the Year, ahead of his own team-mates Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante.
Sky Sports carried his words from the awards dinner in London, and he spent them on other people. “All the credit is for my team-mates, seriously, and for my manager and the staff,” Mahrez said. On the award itself he was more direct. “It’s extra special because, if the players vote for me, it’s because they’ve seen I’ve been great this year, so I’m happy.”
That is the distinction this list keeps running into. The players voted for Mahrez. The medals were won by a squad.
Four: 97 goals, no medal
Adebayor is the fourth-highest African scorer in Premier League history, with 97 goals in 241 appearances for Arsenal, Manchester City and Tottenham. He is the only player in the top five never to have won the title. The closest he came was 2011-12, and even that came at one remove: Manchester City was his club, but he spent that season on loan at Tottenham, and watched City win their first title in 44 years from outside the squad that did it.
What the order is really measuring
Four of Mahrez’s five titles came at a Manchester City side built to win them. Salah’s two came at a Liverpool club that had gone 30 years without the title, and he was there when the wait ended.
Salah once scored 10 goals on opening weekends alone. In his final season he scored seven in the entire league. Both numbers belong to him, and only one of them came with a medal. Count goals and he is 82 clear of the next African on this list. Count titles and he is fourth on it. Neither column is wrong, and only one of them was ever going to be about him.
