Source: Statista

Football is a team sport, but sometimes, a player is so good and performs so much better than the rest of the squad, that the accusation of being a ‘one-man team’ starts to get thrown around. Ronaldo for Portugal, Lukaku in his final season at Everton, and to some degree Suarez for Liverpool – all recent examples of one player carrying his team, through talent and good form, to levels it wouldn’t necessarily have achieved without him. With this in mind, we set out to analyse this season’s Premier League to see if there are any other ‘one-man teams’ lurking around.

Looking at it in terms of goals scored, we calculated the share of the team’s total goals that have been scored by a single player. At the top of the list, and potentially at risk of receiving the derisory label, is Tottenham. Harry Kane has been in an incredible vein of form for a good while now and he really has been dominating his team’s scoresheets. So far this season, 40 percent of Spurs’ goals have been scored by the Englishman.

Actually though, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most fans looks back on their team’s best spells and swoon over a star player they had at the time – a talisman-like figure who drove the team to new heights. A good example of the opposite of this would arguably be Arsenal this season. Wenger and his team are trudging through a decidedly lacklustre and underwhelming campaign. At the same time, they are the team at the bottom of this particular ranking. Their top-scorer so far is Lacazette, with nine, accounting for just 16.4 percent of all of the Gunners’ goals. Looking back to some of their most recent glory days, the names Bergkamp, Henry and Van Persie immediately spring to mind. This does leave you wondering if Arsenal are ‘one-man’ short at the moment.