If you’re going to write about the best striker there ever was, you’re bound to learn a little bit about timing. When Paul Little sat down to put together a book about the season Dixie Dean played for Sligo Rovers, he couldn’t have known its publication would coincide with a modern assault on the greatest English goalscoring record of them all. But even Erling Haaland would concede that there’s a healthy dollop of luck required in all things.
Little’s book – In The Shadow Of Benbulben – came out a couple of months back. It was a pandemic project he’d been tipping away at for a while, and he found a publisher for it in March 2021. The story of the four-month spell in 1939 when Dean came out of retirement to play for the Bit O’ Red and spearhead their run to the FAI Cup final, it’s a yarn that would have been lost to history only for Little’s deep-dive into the archives.
Dixie Dean. Now boy. One of those names from the deep-space outer reaches of English football history that somehow clung on down the decades. When we were kids nobody pretended to be Dixie Dean because it wasn’t like anybody’s father or even grandfather had seen him play. But if you were into football you knew the name because you knew about the time he scored 60 goals for Everton in one season.
The season Clive Allen scored 49 goals for Spurs must have been the first time Dean’s name made any impression on us. It was 1987, and we were all only eight or nine and none of us were Spurs fans. But we were exactly at the age where you started filling in stats boxes in football magazines and learning phrases like “in all competitions”. That would have been what conjured Dixie Dean’s name up for everyone – Allen scored his 49 “in all competitions”. Dean scored 60 goals in the league.
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Sixty goals! And as Little points out in the book, he didn’t even play every game. Everton beat West Ham 7-0 in October 1927 without their star striker, who was away playing for England. He was gone on international duty for two other games in the spring as well, against Portsmouth and Sunderland, both of whom ended the season just a single point above relegation. You’d imagine he’d have found a goal or four in one of those fixtures.
Still, 60 goals in 39 games felt astonishing when we were kids. The names we were used to got 24, 25. Sometimes they got up close to 30. Allen, Ian Rush, Gary Lineker, John Aldridge. These were killer goalscorers, the best around. And yet some guy once scored 60 in a season? How the hell did he do that?
From a distance of almost a century it just doesn’t seem to make sense. One explanation put forward in the book was the change in the offside law that came in the previous season, making it so that two defenders had to be closer to the goal than the attacker rather than three as it had been previously. And it’s true, scoring averages did go up across the board.
But one player scoring 60 goals was – and remains – hilariously out of kilter with the totals from other campaigns. In 125 seasons of top-flight football in England, the closest anyone has come to Dean’s record is Aston Villa’s Tom Waring who scored 49 league goals in the 1930-31 season. Over the years the number of teams in the league was slashed and so there were fewer games for everyone, meaning that it has generally been inconceivable that anyone will ever threaten Dean’s landmark. Sixty goals will forever be out there alone. Untouchable.
Or at least we presumed as much until Haaland came along. Nine games into the Premier League season and Manchester City’s Norwegian goal-machine has 15 goals tucked away. At this point in Dean’s season of seasons he had 17 on the board, including all five against Manchester United 95 years ago last Saturday.
By pleasing coincidence, Dean’s 10th game of the season that year was against Liverpool on October 15th. Haaland’s 10th this time around is against the same opponents on Sunday. Dean didn’t score that day – his first blank of the season. If we know one thing for sure, it’s that Haaland won’t be sparing the horses against one-time title rivals who have kept just two clean sheets so far.
So while it’s almost certainly impossible, stranger things have happened. The fact that City are so grotesquely out in front of everybody else in the league will obviously give rise to more turkey shoots in this campaign than ever before. Haaland already has three hat-tricks to his name and we’re not even at Halloween. It took Dean until December 10th to manage that in 1927. If the season turns into a procession at least the sight of Haaland chasing history might hold the interest.
“Dean scored in 29 of the 39 league games in which he played,” Little writes. “Of the 60 goals he scored, 40 were scored with his feet and 20 with his head – a testament to the excellence of his all-round game. In the 29 games in which he scored, Dixie bagged eight singles, 14 braces, five hat-tricks, as well as four goals against Burnley at Turf Moor and five against United at Goodison.”
The 60-goal season is a scene-setting chapter of a book where the rest of the story is all based in Ireland and is well worth anyone’s time. The notion that by the age of 32 the great Dixie Dean could be plying his trade in what Little describes as “probably the most western outpost of European football at the time”, is almost as fanciful as the idea that he or Haaland or anyone could score 60 league goals in a season. But it happened.
Football tells the maddest stories sometimes.
