For anyone north of 30, it’s depressing to consider that a whole new generation of football fans have grown up without having ever seen Alan Shearer kick a ball.
Still, even for those who didn’t grow up watching Shearer smash goals in every week, his name remains synonymous with the Premier League, his record 260 goals hanging over each new challenger to his crown.
The legendary No.9 is still there in the Match Of The Day studio, affably chucking along as it’s pointed out Harry Kane inches ever closer, or attempting not to look smug when clips are wheeled out of his many ridiculous goals. But Shearer knows, as well all do; he was – still is – the iconic Premier League goalscorer.
He played more than twice as many campaigns in the English top flight as Thierry Henry. Didier Drogba only scored more than 20 goals once; Shearer did so seven times.
Nearest challenger Wayne Rooney made his debut in the competition at the age of 16 and spent 13 seasons at dominant force Manchester United, but he still fell 52 goals short.
Shearer’s record doesn’t even count the 23 league goals he scored for Southampton, starting with a hat-trick on his first start whilst he was earning £35-a-week as a teenager back in 1988, prior to the advent of the Premier League in 1992.
Come the much-publicised rebrand, the striker was 21 years old and approaching his prime. In February 1992, he made his England debut, scoring the opener in a 2-0 victory over France. As Leeds United won the last First Division title, he was enjoying the best campaign of his fledgling career to date with Saints, notching 13 league goals and 21 in all competitions.
That earned a British record £3.6million transfer to newly-promoted Blackburn Rovers, who received considerable backing from local entrepreneur Jack Walker long before the likes of Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour arrived on the scene to skew the scales.
At the dawn of the competition that defined him, Shearer was already a star, the kind of figure that was essential for BSkyB’s huge promotion drive to complete the sport’s transformation into a slick, subscriber-based television commodity and away from the hooliganism that stopped it being a mass-market product during Thatcher’s reign.
Who remembers Sky’s ‘Whole new ball game’ Premier League launch advert? pic.twitter.com/xCZsmDst0L
— 90s Football (@90sfootball) July 21, 2020
That superstar status was fortified on the very first Saturday of the new Premier League…
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